THE INSURRECT 
IN DUBLIN 





Class. 

Book. K J , ;: .? 



-*r 



GopigM - 



CQEXRIGHT DEPOSE 



THE 

INSURRECTION 
IN DUBLIN 



BY THE SAME AUTHOR 

POEMS 
Insurrections 
The Hill of Vision 
Green Branches 



PROSE 

The Crock of Gold 

Here are Ladies 

The Demi-Gods 



J 



THE 

INSURRECTION 
IN DUBLIN 



BY 

JAMES STEPHENS 



Km fork 

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

1916 



All rights reserved 






Copyright, 1916. 
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 



Set up and electrotyped. Published, October, 1916. 



OCT 10 1916 

i 
CI.A445034 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

Foreword v 

I Monday 1 

II Tuesday 28 

III Wednesday 42 

IV Thursday 64 

V Friday 71 

VI Saturday 82 

VII Sunday 88 

VIII The Insurrection Is Over .... 96 

IX The Volunteers 105 

X Some op the Leaders 116 

XI Labour and the Insurrection . . . 124 

XII The Irish Questions 134 



FOREWORD 

The day before the rising was Easter Sun- 
day, and they were crying joyfully in the 
Churches ' ' Christ has risen. ' ' On the fol- 
lowing day they were saying in the streets 
' ' Ireland has risen. ' ' The luck of the mo- 
ment was with her. The auguries were 
good, and, notwithstanding all that has 
succeeded, I do not believe she must take 
to the earth again, nor be ever again 
buried. The pages hereafter were writ- 
ten day by day during the Insurrection 
that followed Holy Week, and, as a hasty 
impression of a most singular time, the 
author allows them to stand without any 
emendation. 

The few chapters which make up this 
book are not a history of the rising. I 



vi Foreword 

knew nothing about the rising. I do not 
know anything about it now, and it may 
be years before exact information on the 
subject is available. What I have writ- 
ten is no more than a statement of what 
passed in one quarter of our city, and a 
gathering together of the rumour and ten- 
sion which for nearly two weeks had to 
serve the Dublin people in lieu of news. 
It had to serve many Dublin people in 
place of bread. 

To-day, the 8th of May, the book is fin- 
ished, and, so far as Ireland is immedi- 
ately concerned, the insurrection is over. 
Action now lies with England, and on that 
action depends whether the Irish Insur- 
rection is over or only suppressed. 

In their dealings with this country, 
English Statesmen have seldom shown po- 
litical imagination; sometimes they have 
been just, sometimes, and often, unjust. 



Foreword vii 

After a certain point I dislike and despise 
justice. It is an attribute of God, and is 
adequately managed by Him alone; but 
between man and man no other ethics save 
that of kindness can give results. I have 
not any hope that this ethic will replace 
that, and I merely mention it in order that 
the good people who read these words may 
enjoy the laugh which their digestion 
needs. 

I have faith in man, I have very little 
faith in States man. But I believe that 
the world moves, and I believe that the 
weight of the rolling planet is going to 
bring freedom to Ireland. Indeed, I 
name this date as the first day of Irish 
freedom, and the knowledge forbids me 
mourn too deeply my friends who are 
dead. 

It may not be worthy of mention, but 
the truth is, that Ireland is not cowed. 



viii Foreword 

She is excited a little. She is gay a little. 
She was not with the revolution, but in a 
few months she will be, and her heart 
which was withering will be warmed by 
the knowledge that men have thought her 
worth dying for. She will prepare to 
make herself worthy of devotion, and that 
devotion wdll never fail her. So little 
does it take to raise our hearts. 

Does it avail anything to describe these 
things to English readers? They have 
never moved the English mind to anything 
except impatience, but to-day and at this 
desperate conjunction they may be less 
futile than heretofore. England also has 
grown patriotic, even by necessity. It is 
necessity alone makes patriots, for in 
times of peace a patriot is a quack when 
he is not a shark. Idealism pays in times 
of peace, it dies in time of war. Our 



Foreivord ix 

idealists are dead and yours are dying 
hourly. 

The English mind may to-day be en- 
abled to understand what is wrong with us, 
and why through centuries we have been 
"disthressful." Let them look at us, I 
do not say through the fumes that are 
still rising from our ruined streets, but 
through the smoke that is rolling from the 
North Sea to Switzerland, and read in 
their own souls the justification for all 
our risings, and for this rising. 

Is it wrong to say that England has not 
one friend in Europe? I say it. Her 
Allies of to-day were her enemies of yes- 
terday, and politics alone will decide what 
they will be to-morrow. I say it, and yet 
I am not entirely right, for she has one 
possible friend unless she should decide 
that even one friend is excessive and irks 



x Foreword 

her. That one possible friend is Ireland. 
I say, and with assurance, that if our na- 
tional questions are arranged there will 
remain no reason for enmity between the 
two countries, and there will remain many 
reasons for friendship. 

It may be objected that the friendship 
of a country such as Ireland has little 
value ; that she is too small geographically, 
and too thinly populated to give aid to any 
one. Only sixty odd years ago our popu- 
lation was close on ten millions of people, 
nor are we yet sterile ; in area Ireland is 
not colossal, but neither is she micro- 
scopic. Mr. Shaw has spoken of her as a 
" cabbage patch at the back of beyond." 
On this kind of description Eome might 
be called a hen-run and Greece a back 
yard. The sober fact is that Ireland has a 
larger geographical area than many an in- 
dependent and prosperous European king- 



Foreword xi 

dom, and for all human and social needs 
she is a fairly big country, and is beauti- 
ful and fertile to boot. She could be made 
worth knowing if goodwill and trust are 
available for the task. 

I believe that what is known as the 
"mastery of the seas" will, when the great 
war is finished, pass irretrievably from 
the hands or the ambition of any nation, 
and that more urgently than ever in her 
history England will have need of a friend. 
It is true that we might be her enemy and 
might do her some small harm — it is truer 
that we could be her friend, and could be 
of very real assistance to her. 

Should the English Statesman decide 
that our friendship is worth having let 
him create a little of the political imagina- 
tion already spoken of. Let him equip us 
(it is England's debt to Ireland) for free- 
dom, not in the manner of a miser who ar- 



xii Foreword 

ranges for the chilly livelihood of a needy 
female relative; but the way a wealthy 
father would undertake the settlement of 
his son. I fear I am assisting my reader 
to laugh too much, but laughter is the sole 
excess that is wholesome. 

If freedom is to come to Ireland — as I 
believe it is — then the Easter Insurrection 
was the only thing that could have hap- 
pened. I speak as an Irishman, and am 
momentarily leaving out of account every 
other consideration. If, after all her 
striving, freedom had come to her as a 
gift, as a peaceful present such as is some- 
times given away with a pound of tea, Ire- 
land would have accepted the gift with 
shamefacedness, and have felt that her 
centuries of revolt had ended in something 
very like ridicule. The blood of brave 
men had to sanctify such a consummation 
if the national imagination was to be 



Foreword xiii 

stirred to the dreadful business which is 
the organising of freedom, and both imagi- 
nation and brains have been stagnant in 
Ireland this many a year. Following on 
such tameness, failure might have been 
predicted, or, at least feared, and war (let 
us call it war for the sake of our pride) 
was due to Ireland before she could enter 
gallantly on her inheritance. We might 
have crept into liberty like some kind of 
domesticated man, whereas now we may 
be allowed to march into freedom with the 
honours of war. I am still appealing to 
the political imagination, for if England 
allows Ireland to formally make peace 
with her that peace will be lasting, ever- 
lasting; but if the liberty you give us is all 
half-measures, and distrusts and stingi- 
nesses, then what is scarcely worth accept- 
ing will hardly be worth thanking you for. 
There is a reference in the earlier pages 



xiv Foreword 

of this record to a letter which I addressed 
to Mr. George Bernard Shaw and pub- 
lished in the New Age. This was a 
thoughtless letter, and subsequent events 
have proved that it was unmeaning and ri- 
diculous. I have since, through the same 
hospitable journal, apologised to Mr. 
Shaw, but have let my reference to the 
matter stand as an indication that elec- 
tricity was already in the air. Every 
statement I made about him in that letter 
and in this book was erroneous ; for, after- 
wards, when it would have been politic to 
run for cover, he ran for the open, and he 
spoke there like the valiant thinker and 
great Irishman that he is. 

Since the foregoing was written events 
have moved in this country. The situa- 
tion is no longer the same. The execu- 
tions have taken place. One cannot justly 



Foreword xv 

exclaim against the measures adopted by 
the military tribunal, and yet, in the in- 
terests of both countries one may deplore 
them. I have said there was no bitterness 
in Ireland, and it was true at the time of 
writing. It is no longer true; but it is 
still possible by generous Statesmanship 
to allay this, and to seal a true union be- 
tween Ireland and England. 



THE INSURRECTION IN 
DUBLIN 

CHAPTER I 

MONDAY 

This has taken every one by surprise. It 
is possible, that, with the exception of 
their Staff, it has taken the Volunteers 
themselves by surprise; but, to-day, our 
peaceful city is no longer peaceful; guns 
are sounding, or rolling and crackling 
from different directions, and, although 
rarely, the rattle of machine guns can be 
heard also. 

Two days ago war seemed very far 
away — so far, that I ha^e covenanted 
with myself to learn the alphabet of 



2 The Insurrection in Dublin 

music. Tom Bodkin had promised to 
present me with a musical instrument 
called a dulcimer — I persist in thinking 
that this is a species of guitar, although 
I am assured that it is a number of small 
metal plates which are struck with sticks, 
and I confess that this description of its 
function prejudices me more than a little 
against it. There is no reason why I 
should think dubiously of such an instru- 
ment, but I do not relish the idea of pro- 
curing music with a stick. With this dul- 
cimer I shall be able to tap out our Irish 
melodies when I am abroad, and transport 
myself to Ireland for a few minutes, or a 
few bars. 

In preparation for this present I had 
through Saturday and Sunday been learn- 
ing the notes of the Scale. The notes and 
spaces on the lines did not trouble me 
much, but those above and below the line 



Monday 3 

seemed ingenious and complicated to a 
degree that frightened me. 

On Saturday I got the Irish Times, and 
found in it a long article by Bernard 
Shaw (reprinted from the New York 
Times). One reads things written by 
Shaw. Why one does read them I do not 
know exactly, except that it is a habit we 
got into years ago, and we read an article 
by Shaw just as we put on our boots in 
the morning — that is, without thinking 
about it, and without any idea of reward. 

His article angered me exceedingly. It 
was called " Irish Nonsense talked in Ire- 
land." It was written (as is almost all of 
his journalistic work) with that bonhomie 
which he has cultivated — it is his manner- 
ism — and which is essentially hypocritical 
and untrue. Bonhomie! It is that man- 
of-the-world attitude, that shop attitude, 
that between-you-and-me-for-are-we-not- 



4 The Insurrection in Dublin 

equal-and-cultured attitude, which is the 
tone of a card-sharper or a trick-of-the- 
loop man. That was the tone of Shaw's 
article. I wrote an open letter to him 
which I sent to the New Age, because I 
doubted that the Dublin papers would 
print it if I sent it to them, and I knew 
that the Irish people who read the other 
papers had never heard of Shaw, except as 
a trade-mark under which very good 
Limerick bacon is sold, and that they 
would not be interested in the opinions of 
a person named Shaw on any subject not 
relevant to bacon. I struck out of my let- 
ter a good many harsh things which I said 
of him, and hoped he would reply to it in 
order that I could furnish these acidities 
to him in a second letter. 

That was Saturday. 

On Sunday I had to go to my office, as 
the Director was absent in London, and 



Monday 5 

there I applied myself to the notes and 
spaces below the stave, but relinquished 
the exercise, convinced that these mys- 
teries were unattainable by man, while the 
knowledge that above the stave there were 
others and not less complex, stayed 
mournfully with me. 

I returned home, and as novels (per- 
haps it is only for the duration of the war) 
do not now interest me I read for some 
time in Madame Blavatsky's " Secret 
Doctrine," which book interests me pro- 
foundly. George Kussell was out of town 
or I would have gone round to his house in 
the evening to tell him what I thought 
about Shaw, and to listen to his own much 
finer ideas on that as on every other sub- 
ject. I went to bed. 

On the morning following I awoke into 
full insurrection and bloody war, but I did 
not know anything about it. It was Bank 



6 The Insurrection in Dublin 

Holiday, but for employments such as 
mine there are not any holidays, so I went 
to my office at the usual hour, and after 
transacting what business was necessary I 
bent myself to the notes above and below 
the stave, and marvelled anew at the in- 
genuity of man. Peace was in the build- 
ing, and if any of the attendants had 
knowledge or rumour of war they did not 
mention it to me. 

At one o'clock I went to lunch. Pass- 
ing the corner of Merrion Eow I saw two 
small groups of people. These people 
were regarding steadfastly in the direc- 
tion of St. Stephen's Green Park, and 
they spoke occasionally to one another 
with that detached confidence which 
proved they were mutually unknown. I 
also, but without approaching them, stared 
in the direction of the Green. I saw noth- 
ing but the narrow street which widened 



Monday 7 

to the Park. Some few people were 
standing in tentative attitudes, and all 
looking in the one direction. As I turned 
from them homewards I received an im- 
pression of silence and expectation and 
excitement. 

On the way home I noticed that many 
silent people were standing in their door- 
ways — an unusual thing in Dublin outside 
of the back streets. The glance of a Dub- 
lin man or woman conveys generally a 
criticism of one's personal appearance, 
and is a little hostile to the passer. The 
look of each person as I passed was stead- 
fast, and contained an enquiry instead of 
a criticism. I felt faintly uneasy, but 
withdrew my mind to a meditation which 
I had covenanted with myself to perform 
daily, and passed to my house. 

There I was told that there had been a 
great deal of rifle firing all the morning, 



8 The Insurrection in Dublin 

and we concluded that the Military re- 
cruits or Volunteer detachments were 
practising that arm. My return to busi- 
ness was by the way I had already come. 
At the corner of Merrion Eow I found 
the same silent groups, who were still 
looking in the direction of the Green, and 
addressing each other occasionally with 
the detached confidence of strangers. 
Suddenly, and on the spur of the moment, 
I addressed one of these silent gazers. 

"Has there been an accident?" said I. 

I indicated the people standing about. 

"What's all this for?" 

He was a sleepy, rough-looking man 
about 40 years of age, with a blunt red 
moustache, and the distant eyes which one 
sees in sailors. He looked at me, stared 
at me as at a person from a different coun- 
try. He grew wakeful and vivid. 

"Don't you know?" said he. 



Monday 9 

And then he saw that I did not know. 

"The Sinn Feiners have seized the City 
this morning." 

"Oh!" said I. 

He continued with the savage earnest- 
ness of one who has amazement in his 
mouth : 

"They seized the City at eleven o'clock 
this morning. The Green there is full of 
them. They have captured the Castle. 
They have taken the Post Office." 

"My God!" said I, staring at him, and 
instantly I turned and went running to- 
wards the Green. 

In a few seconds I banished astonish- 
ment and began to walk. As I drew near 
the Green rifle fire began like sharply- 
cracking whips. It was from the further 
side. I saw that the Gates were closed 
and men were standing inside with guns 
on their shoulders. I passed a house, the 



10 The Insurrection in Dublin 

windows of which were smashed in. As 
I went by a man in civilian clothes slipped 
through the Park gates, which instantly 
closed behind him. He ran towards me, 
and I halted. He was carrying two small 
packets in his hand. He passed me hur- 
riedly, and, placing his leg inside the 
broken window of the house behind me, 
he disappeared. Almost immediately an- 
other man in civilian clothes appeared 
from the broken window of another house. 
He also had something (I don't know 
what) in his hand. He ran urgently to- 
wards the gates, which opened, admitted 
him, and closed again. 

In the centre of this side of the Park a 
rough barricade of carts and motor cars 
had been sketched. It was still full of 
gaps. Behind it was a halted tram, and 
along the vistas of the Green one saw 
other trams derelict, untenanted. 



Monday 11 

I came to the barricade. As I reached 
it and stood by the Shelbourne Hotel, 
which it faced, a loud cry came from the 
Park. The gates opened and three men 
ran out. Two of them held rifles with 
fixed bayonets. The third gripped a 
heavy revolver in his fist. They ran to- 
wards a motor car which had just turned 
the corner, and halted it. The men with 
bayonets took position instantly on either 
side of the car. The man with the re- 
volver saluted, and I heard him begging 
the occupants to pardon him, and direct- 
ing them to dismount. A man and woman 
got down. They were again saluted and 
requested to go to the sidewalk. They 
did so. 

The man crossed and stood by me. He 

NOTE — As I pen these words rifle shot is cracking from 
three different directions and continually. Three minutes 
ago there was two discharges from heavy guns. These are 
the first heavy guns used in the Insurrection, 25th April. 



12 The Insurrection in Dublin 

was very tall and thin, middle-aged, with 
a shaven, wasted face. "I want to get 
down to Armagh to-day," he said to no one 
in particular. The loose bluish skin un- 
der his eyes was twitching. The Volun- 
teers directed the chauffeur to drive to the 
barricade and lodge his car in a particu- 
lar position there. He did it awkwardly, 
and after three attempts he succeeded in 
pleasing them. He was a big, brown- 
faced man, whose knees were rather high 
for the seat he was in, and they jerked with 
the speed and persistence of something 
moved with a powerful spring. His face 
was composed and fully under command, 
although his legs were not. He locked the 
car into the barricade, and then, being a 
man accustomed to be commanded, he 
awaited an order to descend. When the 
order came he walked directly to his mas- 
ter, still preserving all the solemnity of his 



Monday 13 

features. These two men did not address 
a word to each other, but their drilled and 
expressionless eyes were loud with sur- 
prise and fear and rage. They went into 
the Hotel. 

I spoke to the man with the revolver. 
He was no more than a boy, not more cer- 
tainly than twenty years of age, short in 
stature, with close curling red hair and 
blue eyes — a kindly-looking lad. The 
strap of his sombrero had torn loose on 
one side, and except while he held it in his 
teeth it flapped about his chin. His face 
was sunburnt and grimy with dust and 
sweat. 

This young man did not appear to me 
to be acting from his reason. He was 
doing his work from a determination im- 
planted previously, days, weeks perhaps, 
on his imagination. His mind was — 
where? It was not with his body. And 



14 The Insurrection in Dublin 

continually his eyes went searching 
widely, looking for spaces, scanning hast- 
ily the clouds, the vistas of the streets, 
looking for something that did not hinder 
him, looking away for a moment from the 
immediacies and rigours which were im- 
pressed where his mind had been. 

When I spoke he looked at me, and I 
know that for some seconds he did not see 
me. I said : — 

"What is the meaning of all this? 
What Jias happened?" 

He replied collectedly enough in speech, 
but with that ramble and errancy cloud- 
ing his eyes. 

"We have taken the City. We are ex- 
pecting an attack from the military at any 
moment, and those people," he indicated 
knots of men, women and children clus- 
tered towards the end of the Green, 
"won't go home for me. We have the 



Monday 15 

Post Office, and the Railways, and the 
Castle. We have all the City. "We have 
everything." 

(Some men and two women drew behind 
me to listen.) 

"This morning," said he, "the police 
rushed us. One ran at me to take my re- 
volver. I fired but I missed him, and I 
hit a " 



a 



You have far too much talk," said a 
voice to the young man. 

I turned a few steps away, and glanc- 
ing back saw that he was staring after me, 
but I know that he did not see me — he was 
looking at turmoil, and blood, and at fig- 
ures that ran towards him and ran away — 
a world in motion and he in the centre of it 
astonished. 

The men with him did not utter a sound. 
They were both older. One, indeed, a 
short, sturdy man, had a heavy white 



16 The Insurrection in Dublin 

moustache. He was quite collected, and 
took no notice of the skies, or the spaces. 
He saw a man in rubbers placing his hand 
on a motor bicycle in the barricade, and 
called to him instantly : ' ' Let that alone. ' ' 

The motorist did not at once remove his 
hand, whereupon the white-moustached 
man gripped his gun in both hands and 
ran violently towards him. He ran di- 
rectly to him, body to body, and, as he was 
short and the motorist was very tall, 
stared fixedly up in his face. He roared 
up at his face in a mighty voice. 

i ' Are you deaf ? Are you deaf ? Move 
back!" 

The motorist moved away, pursued by 
an eye as steady and savage as the point 
of the bayonet that was level with it. 

Another motor car came round the Ely 
Place corner of the Green and wobbled at 
the sight of the barricade. The three men 



Monday 17 

who had returned to the gates roared 
"Halt," but the driver made a tentative 
effort to turn his wheel. A great shout 
of many voices came then, and the three 
men ran to him. 

"Drive to the barricade," came the or- 
der. 

The driver turned his wheel a point fur- 
ther towards escape, and instantly one of 
the men clapped a gun to the wheel and 
blew the tyre open. Some words were 
exchanged, and then a shout : 

"Drive it on the rim, drive it." 

The tone was very menacing, and the 
motorist turned his car slowly to the barri- 
cade and placed it in. 

For an hour I tramped the City, see- 
ing everywhere these knots of watchful 
strangers speaking together in low tones, 
and it sank into my mind that what I had 
heard was true, and that the City was in 



18 The Insurrection in Dublin 

insurrection. It had been promised for 
so long, and had been threatened for so 
long. Now it was here. I had seen it in 
the Green, others had seen it in other parts 
— the same men clad in dark green and 
equipped with rifle, bayonet, and bando- 
lier, the same silent activity. The police 
had disappeared from the streets. At 
that hour I did not see one policeman, nor 
did I see one for many days, and men said 
that several of them had been shot earlier 
in the morning; that an officer had been 
shot on Portobello Bridge, that many sol- 
diers had been killed, and that a good 
many civilians were dead also. 

Around me as I walked the rumour of 
war and death was in the air. Continu- 
ally and from every direction rifles were 
crackling and rolling; sometimes there 
was only one shot, again it would be a roll 
of firing crested with single, short explo- 



Monday 19 

sions, and sinking again to whip-like snaps 
and whip-like echoes; then for a moment 
silence, and then again the guns leaped in 
the air. 

The rumour of positions, bridges, pub- 
lic places, railway stations, Government 
offices, having been seized w T as persistent, 
and was not denied by any voice. 

I met some few people I knew. P. H., 
T. M., who said: "Well!" and thrust 
their eyes into me as though they were 
rummaging me for information. 

But there were not very many people in 
the streets. The greater part of the popu- 
lation were away on Bank Holiday, and 
did not know anything of this business. 
Many of them would not know anything 
until they found they had to walk home 
from Kingstown, Dalkey, Howth, or wher- 
ever they were. 

I returned to my office, decided that I 



20 The Insurrection in Dublin 

would close it for the day. The men were 
very relieved when I came in, and were 
more relieved when I ordered the gong to 
be sounded. There were some few people 
in the place, and they were soon put out. 
The outer gates were locked, and the great 
door, but I kept the men on duty until the 
evening. We were the last public institu- 
tion open; all the others had been closed 
for hours. 

I went upstairs and sat down, but had 
barely reached the chair before I stood up 
again, and began to pace my room, to and 
fro, to and fro; amazed, expectant, in- 
quiet ; turning my ear to the shots, and my 
mind to speculations that began in the 
middle, and were chased from there by 
others before they had taken one thought 
forward. But then I took myself reso- 
lutely and sat me down, and I pencilled out 
exercises above the stave, and under the 



Monday 21 

stave ; and discovered suddenly that I was 
again marching the floor, to and fro, to 
and fro, with thoughts bursting about my 
head as though they were fired on me from 
concealed batteries. 

At five o'clock I left. I met Miss P., 
all of whose rumours coincided with those 
I had gathered. She was in exceeding 
good humour and interested. Leaving 
her I met Cy — , and we turned together 
up to the Green. As we proceeded, the 
sound of firing grew more distinct, but 
when we reached the Green it died away 
again. We stood a little below the Shel- 
bourne Hotel, looking at the barricade and 
into the Park. We could see nothing. 
Not a Volunteer was in sight. The Green 
seemed a desert. There were only the 
trees to be seen, and through them small 
green vistas of sward. 

Just then a man stepped on the footpath 



22 The Insurrection in Dublin 

and walked directly to the barricade. He 
stopped and gripped the shafts of a lorry 
lodged near the centre. At that instant 
the Park exploded into life and sound; 
from nowhere armed men appeared at the 
railings, and they all shouted at the man. 

"Put down that lorry. Let out and go 
away. Let out at once." 

These were the cries. The man did not 
let out. He halted with the shafts in his 
hand, and looked towards the vociferous 
palings. Then, and very slowly, he be- 
gan to draw the lorry out of the barricade. 
The shouts came to him again, very loud, 
very threatening, but he did not attend to 
them. 

"He is the man that owns the lorry," 
said a voice beside me. 

Dead silence fell on the people around 
while the man slowly drew his cart down 
by the footpath. Then three shots rang 



Monday 23 

out in succession. At the distance he 
could not be missed, and it was obvious 
they were trying to frighten him. He 
dropped the shafts, and instead of going 
away he walked over to the Volunteers. 

"He has a nerve," said another voice 
behind me. 

The man walked directly towards the 
Volunteers, who, to the number of about 
ten, were lining the railings. He walked 
slowly, bent a little forward, with one hand 
raised and one finger up as though he were 
going to make a speech. Ten guns were 
pointing at him, and a voice repeated 
many times : 

"Go and put back that lorry or you are 
a dead man. Go before I count four. 
One, two, three, four " 

A rifle spat at him, and in two undulat- 
ing movements the man sank on himself 
and sagged to the ground. 



24 The Insurrection in Dublin 

I ran to him with some others, while a 
woman screamed unmeaningly, all on one 
strident note. The man was picked up 
and carried to a hospital beside the Arts 
Club. There was a hole in the top of his 
head, and one does not know how ugly 
blood can look until it has been seen clotted 
in hair. As the poor man was being car- 
ried in, a woman plumped to her knees in 
the road and began not to scream but to 
screech. 

At that moment the Volunteers were 
hated. The men by whom I was and who 
were lifting the body, roared into the rail- 
ings : — 

"We'll be coming back for you, damn 
you." 

From the railings there came no reply, 
and in an instant the place was again 
desert and silent, and the little green vistas 
were slumbering among the trees. 



Monday 25 

No one seemed able to estimate the num- 
ber of men inside the Green, and through 
the day no considerable body of men had 
been seen, only those who held the gates, 
and the small parties of threes and fours 
who arrested motors and carts for their 
barricades. Among these were some who 
were only infants — one boy seemed about 
twelve years of age. He was strutting the 
centre of the road with a large revolver 
in his small fist. A motor car came by 
him containing three men, and in the 
shortest of time he had the car lodged in 
his barricade, and dismissed its stupefied 
occupants with a wave of his armed hand. 

The knots were increasing about the 
streets, for now the Bank Holiday people 
began to wander back from places that 
were not distant, and to them it had all to 
be explained anew. Free movement was 
possible everywhere in the City, but the 



26 The Insurrection in Dublin 

constant crackle of rifles restricted some- 
what that freedom. Up to one o'clock at 
night belated travellers were straggling 
into the City, and curious people were 
wandering from group to group still try- 
ing to gather information. 

I remained awake until four o'clock in 
the morning. Every five minutes a rifle 
cracked somewhere, but about a quarter to 
twelve sharp volleying came from the di- 
rection of Portobello Bridge, and died 
away after some time. The windows of 
my flat listen out towards the Green, and 
obliquely towards Sackville Street. In 
another quarter of an hour there were vol- 
leys from Stephen's Green direction, and 
this continued with intensity for about 
twenty-five minutes. Then it fell into a 
sputter of fire and ceased. 

I went to bed about four o'clock con- ' 
vinced that the Green had been rushed by 



Monday 27 

the military and captured, and that the 
rising was at an end. 

That was the first day of the insurrec- 
tion. 



CHAPTER II 

TUESDAY 

A sultry, lowering day, and dusk skies 
fat with rain. 

I left for my office, believing that the in- 
surrection was at an end. At a corner I 
asked a man was it all finished. He said 
it was not, and that, if anything, it was 
worse. 

On this day the rumours began, and I 
think it will be many a year before the 
rumours cease. The Irish Times pub- 
lished an edition which contained nothing 
but an official Proclamation that evilly- 
disposed persons had disturbed the peace, 
and that the situation was well in hand. 
The news stated in three lines that there 

28 



Tuesday 29 

was a Sinn Fein rising in Dublin, and that 
the rest of the country was quiet. 

No English or country papers came. 
There was no delivery or collection of let- 
ters. All the shops in the City were shut. 
There was no traffic of any kind in the 
streets. There was no way of gathering 
any kind of information, and rumour gave 
all the news. 

It seemed that the Military and the 
Government had been taken unawares. 
It was Bank Holiday, and many military 
officers had gone to the races, or were away 
on leave, and prominent members of the 
Irish Government had gone to England 
on Sunday. 

It appeared that everything claimed on 
the previous day was true, and that the 
City of Dublin was entirely in the hands 
of the Volunteers. They had taken and 
sacked Jacob's Biscuit Factory, and had 



30 The Insurrection in Dublin 

converted it into a fort which they held. 
They had the Post Office, and were build- 
ing barricades around it ten feet high 
of sandbags, cases, wire entanglements. 
They had pushed out all the windows and 
sandbagged them to half their height, 
while cart-loads of food, vegetables and 
ammunition were going in continually. 
They had dug trenches and were laying 
siege to one of the city barracks. 

It was current that intercourse between 
Germany and Ireland had been frequent 
chiefly by means of submarines, which 
came up near the coast and landed ma- 
chine guns, rifles and ammunition. It 
was believed also that the whole country 
had risen, and that many strong places 
and cities were in the hands of the Volun- 
teers. Cork Barracks was said to be 
taken while the officers were away at the 
Curragh races, that the men without of- 



Tuesday 31 

ficers were disorganised, and the place 
easily captured. 

It was said that Germans, thousands 
strong, had landed, and that many Irish 
Americans with German officers had ar- 
rived also with full military equipment. 

On the previous day the Volunteers had 
proclaimed the Irish Republic. This cere- 
mony was conducted from the Mansion 
House steps, and the manifesto was said 
to have been read by Pearse, of St. Enda's. 
The Eepublican and Volunteer flag was 
hoisted on the Mansion House. The lat- 
ter consisted of vertical colours of green, 
white and orange. Kerry wireless station 
was reported captured, and news of the 
Republic flashed abroad. These rumours 
were flying in the street. 

It was also reported that two transports 
had come in the night and had landed from 
England about 8,000 soldiers. An attack 



32 The Insurrection in Dublin 

reported on the Post Office by a troop of 
lancers who were received with fire and 
repulsed. It is foolish to send cavalry 
into street war. 

In connection with this lancer charge at 
the Post Office it is said that the people, 
and especially the women, sided with the 
soldiers, and that the Volunteers were as- 
sailed by these women with bricks, bottles, 
sticks, to cries of: 

" Would you be hurting the poor men?" 

There were other angry ladies who 
threatened Volunteers, addressing to them 
this petrifying query : 

' ' Would you be hurting the poor 
horses?" 

Indeed, the best people in the world live 
in Dublin. 

The lancers retreated to the bottom of 
Sackville Street, where they remained for 
some time in the centre of a crowd who 



Tuesday 33 

were caressing their horses. It may have 
seemed to them a rather curious kind of 
insurrection — that is, if they were stran- 
gers to Ireland. 

In the Post Office neighbourhood the 
Volunteers had some difficulty in dealing 
with the people who surged about them 
while they were preparing the barricade, 
and hindered them to some little extent. 
One of the Volunteers was particularly 
noticeable. He held a lady's umbrella in 
his hand, and whenever some person be- 
came particularly annoying he would leap 
the barricade and chase his man half a 
street, hitting him over the head with the 
umbrella. It was said that the wonder of 
the world was not that Ireland was at war, 
but that after many hours the umbrella 
was still unbroken. A Volunteer night 
attack on the Quays was spoken of, 
whereat the military were said to have 



34 The Insurrection in Dublin 

been taken by surprise and six carts of 
their ammunition captured. This was 
probably untrue. Also, that the Volun- 
teers had blown up the Arsenal in the 
Phoenix Park. 

There had been looting in the night 
about Sackville Street, and it was current 
that the Volunteers had shot twenty of the 
looters. 

The shops attacked were mainly haber- 
dashers, shoe shops, and sweet shops. 
Very many sweet shops were raided, and 
until the end of the rising sweet shops 
were the favourite mark of the looters. 
There is something comical in this looting 
of sweet shops — something almost inno- 
cent and child-like. Possibly most of the 
looters are children who are having the 
sole gorge of their lives. They have 
tasted sweetstuffs they had never toothed 
before, and will never taste again in this 



Tuesday 35 

life, and until they die the insurrection of 
1916 will have a sweet savour for them. 

I went to the Green. At the corner of 
Merrion Row a horse was lying on the 
footpath surrounded by blood. He bore 
two bullet wounds, but the blood came 
from his throat which had been cut. 

Inside the Green railings four bodies 
could be seen lying on the ground. They 
were dead Volunteers. 

The rain was falling now persistently, 
and persistently from the Green and from 
the Shelbourne Hotel snipers were ex- 
changing bullets. Some distance beyond 
the Shelbourne I saw another Volunteer 
stretched out on a seat just within the 
railings. He was not dead, for, now and 
again, his hand moved feebly in a gesture 
for aid ; the hand was completely red with 
blood. His face could not be seen. He 
was just a limp mass, upon which the rain 



36 The Insurrection in Dublin 

beat pitilessly, and he was sodden and 
shapeless, and most miserable to see. His 
companions could not draw him in for the 
spot was covered by the snipers from the 
Shelbourne. Bystanders stated that sev- 
eral attempts had already been made to 
rescue him, but that he would have to re- 
main there until the fall of night. 

From Trinity College windows and roof 
there was also sniping, but the Shelbourne 
Hotel riflemen must have seriously trou- 
bled the Volunteers in the Green. 

As I went back I stayed a while in front 
of the hotel to count the shots that had 
struck the windows. There were fourteen 
shots through the ground windows. The 
holes were clean through, each surrounded 
by a star — the bullets went through but 
did not crack the glass. There were three 
places in which the windows had holes 
half a foot to a foot wide and high. Here 



Tuesday 37 

many rifles must have fired at the one mo- 
ment. It must have been as awkward in- 
side the Shelbourne Hotel as it was inside 
the Green. 

A lady who lived in Baggot Street said 
she had been up all night, and, with her 
neighbours, had supplied tea and bread to 
the soldiers who were lining the street. 
The officer to whom she spoke had made 
two or three attacks to draw fire and esti- 
mate the Volunteers' positions, numbers, 
&c, and he told her that he considered 
there were 3,000 well-armed Volunteers in 
the Green, and as he had only 1,000 sol- 
diers, he could not afford to deliver a real 
attack, and was merely containing them. 

Amiens Street station reported recap- 
tured by the military; other stations are 
said to be still in the Volunteers' posses- 
sion. 

The story goes that about twelve o'clock 



38 The Insurrection in Dublin 

on Monday an English officer had marched 
into the Post Office and demanded two 
penny stamps from the amazed Volun- 
teers who were inside. He thought their 
uniforms were postal uniforms. They 
brought him in, and he is probably still 
trying to get a perspective on the occur- 
rence. They had as prisoners in the Post 
Office a certain number of soldiers, and 
rumour had it that these men accommo- 
dated themselves quickly to duress, and 
were busily engaged peeling potatoes for 
the meal which they would partake of 
later on with the Volunteers. 

Earlier in the day I met a wild indi- 
vidual who spat rumour as though his 
mouth were a machine gun or a linotype 
machine. He believed everything he 
heard; and everything he heard became 
as by magic favourable to his hopes, which 
were violently anti-English. One unfa- 



Tuesday 39 

vourable rumour was instantly crushed by 
him with three stories which were favour- 
able and triumphantly so. He said the 
Germans had landed in three places. One 
of these landings alone consisted of fifteen 
thousand men. The other landings prob- 
ably beat that figure. The whole City of 
Cork was in the hands of the Volunteers, 
and, to that extent, might be said to be 
peaceful. German warships had defeated 
the English, and their transports were 
speeding from every side. The whole 
country was up, and the garrison was out- 
numbered by one hundred to one. These 
Dublin barracks which had not been taken 
were now besieged and on the point of sur- 
render. 

I think this man created and winged 
every rumour that flew in Dublin, and he 
was the sole individual whom I heard 
definitely taking a side. He left me, and, 



40 The Insurrection in Dublin 

looking back, I saw him pouring his news 
into the ear of a gaping stranger whom he 
had arrested for the purpose. I almost 
went back to hear would he tell the same 
tale or would he elaborate it into a new 
thing, for I am interested in the art of 
story-telling. 

At eleven o'clock the rain ceased, and to 
it succeeded a beautiful night, gusty with 
wind, and packed with sailing clouds and 
stars. We were expecting visitors this 
night, but the sound of guns may have 
warned most people away. Three only 
came, and with them we listened from my 
window to the guns at the Green challeng- 
ing and replying to each other, and to 
where, further away, the Trinity snipers 
were crackling, and beyond again to the 
sounds of war from Sackville Street. 
The firing was fairly heavy, and often the 



Tuesday 41 

short rattle of machine guns could be 
heard. 

One of the stories told was that the Vol- 
unteers had taken the South Dublin Union 
Workhouse, occupied it, and trenched the 
grounds. They were heavily attacked by 
the military, who, at a loss of 150 men, 
took the place. The tale went that to- 
wards the close the officer in command 
offered them terms of surrender, but the 
Volunteers replied that they were not 
there to surrender. They were there to 
be killed. The garrison consisted of fifty 
men, and the story said that fifty men 
were killed. 



CHAPTER III 

WEDNESDAY 

It was three o'clock before I got to sleep 
last night, and during the hours machine 
guns and rifle firing had been continu- 
ous. 

This morning the sun is shining bril- 
liantly, and the movement in the streets 
possesses more of animation than it has 
done. The movement ends always in a 
knot of people, and folk go from group to 
group vainly seeking information, and 
quite content if the rumour they presently 
gather differs even a little from the one 
they have just communicated. 

The first statement I heard was that the 
Green had been taken by the military ; the 

42 



Wednesday 43 

second that it had been re-taken ; the third 
that it had not been taken at all. The 
facts at last emerged that the Green had 
not been occupied by the soldiers, but that 
the Volunteers had retreated from it into 
a house which commanded it. This was 
found to be the College of Surgeons, and 
from the windows and roof of this College 
they were sniping. A machine gun was 
mounted on the roof; other machine guns, 
however, opposed them from the roofs 
of the Shelbourne Hotel, the United 
Service Club, and the Alexandra Club. 
Thus a triangular duel opened between 
these positions across the trees of the 
Park. 

Through the railings of the Green some 
rifles and bandoliers could be seen lying on 
the ground, as also the deserted trenches 
and snipers' holes. Small boys bolted in 
to see these sights and bolted out again 



44 The Insurrection in Dublin 

with bullets quickening their feet. Small 
boys do not believe that people will really 
kill them, but small boys were killed. 

The dead horse was still lying stiff and 
lamentable on the footpath. 

This morning a gunboat came up the 
Liffey and helped to bombard Liberty 
Hall. The Hall is breeched and useless. 
Eumour says that it was empty at the 
time, and that Connolly with his men had 
marched long before to the Post Office and 
the Green. The same source of informa- 
tion relates that three thousand Volun- 
teers came from Belfast on an excursion 
train and that they marched into the Post 
Office. 

On this day only one of my men came in. 
He said that he had gone on the roof and 
had been shot at, consequently that the 
Volunteers held some of the covering 
houses. I went to the roof and remained 



Wednesday 45 

there for half an hour. There were no 
shots, but the firing from the direction of 
Sackville Street was continuous and at 
times exceedingly heavy. 

To-day the Irish Times was published. 
It contained a new military proclamation, 
and a statement that the country was 
peaceful, and told that in Sackville Street 
some houses were burned to the ground. 

On the outside railings a bill proclaim- 
ing Martial Law was posted. 

Into the newspaper statement that 
peace reigned in the country one was in- 
clined to read more of disquietude than of 
truth, and one said is the country so ex- 
traordinarily peaceful that it can be dis- 
missed in three lines. There is too much 
peace or too much reticence, but it will be 
some time before we hear from outside of 
Dublin. 

Meanwhile the sun was shining. It was 



46 The Insurrection in Dublin 

a delightful day, and the streets outside 
and around the areas of fire were animated 
and even gay. In the streets of Dublin 
there were no morose faces to be seen. 
Almost every one was smiling and atten- 
tive, and a democratic feeling was abroad, 
to which our City is very much a stranger ; 
for while in private we are a sociable and 
talkative people we have no street man- 
ners or public ease whatever. Every per- 
son spoke to every other person, and men 
and women mixed and talked without con- 
straint. 

Was the City for or against the Volun- 
teers ? Was it for the Volunteers, and yet 
against the rising? It is considered now 
(writing a day or two afterwards) that 
Dublin was entirely against the Volun- 
teers, but on the day of which I write no 
such certainty could be put forward. 
There was a singular reticence on the sub- 



Wednesday 47 

ject. Men met and talked volubly, but 
they said nothing that indicated a personal 
desire or belief. They asked for and ex- 
changed the latest news> or, rather, ru- 
mour, and while expressions were fre- 
quent of astonishment at the suddenness 
and completeness of the occurrence, no 
expression of opinion for or against was 
anyw T here formulated. 

Sometimes a man said, "They will be 
beaten of course," and, as he prophesied, 
the neighbour might surmise if he did so 
with a sad heart or a merry one, but they 
knew nothing and asked nothing of his 
views, and themselves advanced no flag. 

This was among the men. 

The women were less guarded, or, per- 
haps, knew they had less to fear. Most of 
the female opinion I heard was not alone 
unfavourable but actively and viciously 
hostile to the rising. This was noticeable 



48 The Insurrection in Dublin 

among the best dressed class of our popu- 
lation; the worst dressed, indeed the fe- 
male dregs of Dublin life, expressed a like 
antagonism, and almost in similar lan- 
guage. The view expressed was — 

"I hope every man of them will be 
shot." 

And— 

"They ought to be all shot." 

Shooting, indeed, was proceeding ev- 
erywhere. During daylight, at least, the 
sound is not sinister nor depressing, and 
the thought that perhaps a life had ex- 
ploded with that crack is not depressing 
either. 

In the last two years of world-war our 
ideas on death have undergone a change. 
It is not now the furtive thing that crawled 
into your bed and which you fought with 
pill-boxes and medicine bottles. It has 
become again a rider of the wind whom 



Wednesday 49 

you may go coursing with through the 
fields and open places. All the morbidity 
is gone, and the sickness, and what re- 
mains to Death is now health and excite- 
ment. So Dublin laughed at the noise of 
its own bombardment, and made no moan 
about its dead — in the sunlight. After- 
wards — in the rooms, when the night fell, 
and instead of silence that mechanical 
barking of the maxims and the whistle and 
screams of the rifles, the solemn roar of 
the heavier guns, and the red glare cover- 
ing the sky. It is possible that in the 
night Dublin did not laugh, and that she 
was gay in the sunlight for no other reason 
than that the night was past. 

On this day fighting was incessant at 
Mount Street Bridge. A party of Volun- 
teers had seized three houses covering the 
bridge and converted these into forts. It 
is reported that military casualties at this 



50 The Insurrection in Dublin 

point were very heavy. The Volunteers 
are said also to hold the South Dublin 
Union. The soldiers have seized Guin- 
ness 's Brewery, while their opponents 
have seized another brewery in the neigh- 
bourhood, and between these two there is 
a continual fusillade. 

Fighting is brisk about Ringsend and 
along the Canal. Dame Street was said 
to be held in many places by the Volun- 
teers. I went down Dame Street, but saw 
no Volunteers, and did not observe any 
sniping from the houses. Further, as 
Dame Street is entirely commanded by the 
roofs and windows of Trinity College, it 
is unlikely that ;they should be here. 

It was curious to observe this, at other 
times, so animated street, broad and de- 
serted, with at the corners of side streets 
small knots of people watching. Seen 
from behind, Grattan's Statue in College 



Wednesday 51 

Green seemed almost alive, and he had 
the air of addressing warnings and re- 
proaches to Trinity College. 

The Proclamation issued to-day warns 
all people to remain within doors until five 
o'clock in the morning, and after seven 
o'clock at night. 

It is still early. There is no news of 
any kind, and the rumours begin to catch 
quickly on each other and to cancel one an- 
other out. Dublin is entirely cut off from 
England, and from the outside world. It 
is, just as entirely cut off from the rest of 
Ireland ; no news of any kind filters in to 
us. We are land-locked and sea-locked, 
but, as yet, it does not much matter. 

Meantime the belief grows that the Vol- 
unteers may be able to hold out much 
longer than had been imagined. The idea 
at first among the people had been that the 
insurrection would be ended the morning 



52 The Insurrection in Dublin 

after it had begun. But to-day, the insur- 
rection having lasted three days, people 
are ready to conceive that it may last for- 
ever. There is almost a feeling of grati- 
tude towards the Volunteers because they 
are holding out for a little while, for had 
they been beaten the first or second day the 
City would have been humiliated to the 
soul. 

People say: "Of course, they will be 
beaten." The statement is almost a 
query, and th6y continue, "but they are 
putting up a decent fight. " For being 
beaten does not greatly matter in Ireland, 
but not fighting does matter. i l They went 
forth always to the battle ; and they always 
fell." Indeed, the history of the Irish 
race is in that phrase. 

The firing from the roofs of Trinity Col- 
lege became violent. I crossed Dame 
Street some distance up, struck down the 



Wednesday 53 

Quays, and went along these until I 
reached the Ballast Office. Further than 
this it was not possible to go, for a step be- 
yond the Ballast Office would have 
brought one into the unending stream of 
lead that was pouring from Trinity and 
other places. I was looking on O'Connell 
Bridge and Sackville Street, and the house 
facing me was Kelly's — a red-brick fishing 
tackle shop, one half of which was on the 
Quay and the other half in Sackville 
Street. This house was being bombarded. 

I counted the report of six different 
machine guns which played on it. Rifles 
innumerable and from every sort of place 
were potting its windows, and at intervals 
of about half a minute the shells from a 
heavy gun lobbed in through its windows 
or thumped mightily against its walls. 

For three hours that bombardment con- 
tinued, and the walls stood in a cloud of 



54 The Insurrection in Dublin 

red dust and smoke. Rifle and machine 
gun bullets pattered over every inch of it, 
and, unfailingly the heavy gun pounded its 
shells through the windows. 

One's heart melted at the idea that hu- 
man beings were crouching inside that vol- 
cano of death, and I said to myself, "Not 
even a fly can be alive in that house. ' ' 

No head showed at any window, no rifle 
cracked from window or roof in reply. 
The house was dumb, lifeless, and I 
thought every one of those men are dead. 

It was then, and quite suddenly, that the 
possibilities of street fighting flashed on 
me, and I knew there was^no person in the 
house, and said to myself, "They have 
smashed through the walls with a hatchet 
and are sitting in the next house, or they 
have long ago climbed out by the skylight 
and are on a roof half a block away." 
Then the thought came to me — they have 



Wednesday 55 

and hold the entire of Sackville Street 
down to the Post Office. Later on this 
proved to be the case, and I knew at this 
moment that Sackville Street was doomed. 

I continued to watch the bombardment, 
but no longer with the anguish which had 
before torn me. Near by there were four 
men, and a few yards away, clustered in a 
lanewav, there were a dozen others. An 
agitated girl was striding from the farther 
group to the one in which I was, and she 
addressed the men in the most obscene lan- 
guage which I have ever heard. She ad- 
dressed them man by man, and she con- 
tinued to speak and cry and scream at 
them with all that obstinate, angry pa- 
tience of which only a woman is capable. 

She cursed us all. She called down dis- 
eases on every human being in the world 
excepting only the men who were being 
bombarded. She demanded of the folk in 



56 The Insurrection in Dublin 

the laneway that they should march at 
least into the roadway and prove that they 
were proud men and were not afraid of 
bullets. She had been herself into the 
danger zone. Had stood herself in the 
track of the guns, and had there cursed her 
fill for half an hour, and she desired that 
the men should do at least what she had 
done. 

This girl was quite young — about nine- 
teen years of age — and was dressed in the 
customary shawl and apron of her class. 
Her face was rather pretty, or it had that 
pretty slenderness and softness of outline 
which belong to youth. But every sen- 
tence she spoke contained half a dozen in- 
decent words. Alas, it was only that her 
vocabulary was not equal to her emotions, 
and she did not know how to be emphatic 
without being obscene — it is the cause of 
most of the meaningless swearing one 



Wednesday 57 

hears every day. She spoke to me for a 
minute, and her eyes were as soft as those 
of a kitten and her language was as gentle 
as her eyes. She wanted a match to light 
a cigarette, but I had none, and said that 
I also wanted one. In a few minutes she 
brought me a match, and then she recom- 
menced her tireless weaving of six vile 
words into hundreds of stupid sentences. 

About five o'clock the guns eased off of 
Kelly's. 

To inexperienced eyes they did not seem 
to have done very much damage, but after- 
wards one found that although the walls 
were standing and apparently solid there 
was no inside to the house. From roof to 
basement the building was bare as a dog 
kennel. There were no floors inside, there 
was nothing there but blank space ; and on 
the ground within was the tumble and rub- 
bish that had been roof and floors and fur- 



58 The Insurrection in Dublin 

niture. Everything inside was smashed 
and pulverised into scrap and dust, and 
the only objects that had consistency and 
their ancient shape were the bricks that 
fell when the shells struck them. 

Kifle shots had begun to strike the house 
on the further side of the street, a jewel- 
lers' shop called Hopkins & Hopkins. The 
impact of these balls on the bricks was 
louder than the sound of the shot which 
immediately succeeded, and each bullet 
that struck brought down a shower of fine 
red dust from the walls. Perhaps thirty 
or forty shots in all were fired at Hopkins', 
and then, except for an odd crack, firing 
ceased. 

During all this time there had been no 
reply from the Volunteers, and I thought 
they must be husbanding their ammuni- 
tion, and so must be short of it, and that it 
would be only a matter of a few days be- 



Wednesday 59 

fore the end. All this, I said to myself, 
will be finished in a few days, and they will 
be finished; life here will recommence ex- 
actly where it left off, and except for some 
newly-filled graves, all will be as it had 
been until they become a tradition and en- 
ter the imagination of their race. 

I spoke to several of the people about 
me, and found the same willingness to ex- 
change news that I had found elsewhere in 
the City, and the same reticences as re- 
garded their private opinions. Two of 
them, indeed, and they were the only two 
I met with during the insurrection, ex- 
pressed, although in measured terms, ad- 
miration for the Volunteers, and while 
they did not side with them they did not 
say anything against them. One was a 
labouring man, the other a gentleman. 
The remark of the latter was : 

"I am an Irishman, and (pointing to 



60 The Insurrection in Dublin 

the shells that were bursting through the 
windows in front of us) I hate to see that 
being done to other Irishmen." 

He had come from some part of the 
country to spend the Easter Holidays in 
Dublin, and was unable to leave town 
again. 

The labouring man — he was about fifty- 
six years of age — spoke very quietly and 
collectedly about the insurrection. He 
was a type with whom I had come very lit- 
tle in contact, and I was surprised to find 
how simple and good his speech was, and 
how calm his ideas. He thought labour 
was in this movement to a greater extent 
than was imagined. I mentioned that 
Liberty Hall had been blown up, and that 
the garrison had either surrendered or 
been killed. He replied that a gunboat 
had that morning come up the river and 
had blown Liberty Hall into smash, but, he 



Wednesday 61 

added, there were no men in it. All the 
Labour Volunteers had marched with Con- 
nolly into the Post Office. 

He said the Labour Volunteers might 
possibly number about one thousand men, 
but that it would be quite safe to say eight 
hundred, and he held that the Labour Vol- 
unteers, or the Citizens' Army, as they 
called themselves, had always been careful 
not to reveal their numbers. They had al- 
ways announced that they possessed about 
two hundred and fifty men, and had never 
paraded any more than that number at 
any one time. Workingmen, he continued, 
knew that the men who marched were al- 
ways different men. The police knew it, 
too, but they thought that the Citizens' 
Army was the most deserted-from force in 
the world. 

The men, however, were not deserters — 
you don't, he said, desert a man like Con- 



62 The Insurrection in Dublin 

nolly, and they were merely taking their 
turn at being drilled and disciplined. 
They were raised against the police who, 
in the big strike of two years ago, had acted 
towards them with unparalleled savagery, 
and the men had determined that the police 
would never again find them thus disor- 
ganised. 

This man believed that every member of 
the Citizen Army had marched with their 
leader. 

"The men, I know," said he, " would 
not be afraid of anything, and," he con- 
tinued, "they are in the Post Office 



now." 



"What chance have they?" 

"None," he replied, "and they never 
said they had, and they never thought they 
woud have any." 

"How long do you think they'll be able 
to hold out?" 



Wednesday 63 

He nodded towards the house that had 
been bombarded by heavy guns. 

"That will root them out of it quick 
enough," was his reply. 

"I'm going home," said he then, "the 
people will be wondering if I'm dead or 
alive," and he walked away from that sad 
street, as I did myself a few minutes after- 
wards. 



CHAPTER IV 

THURSDAY 

Again, the rumours greeted one. This 
place had fallen and had not fallen. Such 
a position had been captured by the sol- 
diers; recaptured by the Volunteers, 
and had not been attacked at all. But 
certainly fighting was proceeding. Up 
Mount Street, the rifle volleys were con- 
tinuous, and the coming and going of 
ambulance cars from that direction were 
continuous also. Some spoke of pitched 
battles on the bridge, and said that as yet 
the advantage lay with the Volunteers. 

At 11.30 there came the sound of heavy 
guns firing in the direction of Sackville 
Street. I went on the roof, and remained 

64 



Thursday 65 

there for some time. From this height 
the sounds could be heard plainly. There 
was sustained firing along the whole cen- 
tral line of the City, from the Green down 
to Trinity College, and from thence to 
Sackville Street, and the report of the 
various types of arm could be easily dis- 
tinguished. There were rifles, machine 
guns and very heavy cannon. There was 
another sound which I could not put a 
name to, something that coughed out over 
all the other sounds, a short, sharp bark, or 
rather a short noise something like the 
popping of a tremendous cork. 

I met D. H. His chief emotion is one of 
astonishment at the organising powers dis- 
played by the Volunteers. We have ex- 
changed rumours, and found that our 
equipment in this direction is almost iden- 
tical. He says Sheehy Skeffington has 
been killed. That he was arrested in a, 



66 The Insurrection in Dublin 

house wherein arms were found, and was 
shot out of hand. 

I hope this is another rumour, for, so 
far as my knowledge of him goes, he was 
not with the Volunteers, and it is said that 
he was antagonistic to the forcible methods 
for which the Volunteers stood. But the 
tale of his death is so persistent that one is 
inclined to believe it. 

He was the most absurdly courageous 
man I have ever met with or heard of. He 
has been in every trouble that has touched 
Ireland these ten years back, and he has 
always been in on the generous side, there- 
fore, and naturally, on the side that was 
unpopular and weak. It would seem in- 
deed that a cause had only to be weak to 
gain his sympathy, and his sympathy never 
stayed at home. There are so many good 
people who "sympathise" with this or that 
cause, and, having given that measure of 



Thursday 67 

their emotion, they give no more of it or 
of anything else. But he rushed instantly 
to the street. A large stone, the lift of a 
footpath, the base of a statue, any place 
and every place was for him a pulpit ; and, 
in the teeth of whatever oppression or dis- 
aster or power, he said his say. 

There are multitudes of men in Dublin 
of all classes and creeds who can boast that 
they kicked Sheehy Skeffington, or that 
they struck him on the head with walking 
sticks and umbrellas, or that they smashed 
their fists into his face, and jumped on him 
when he fell. It is by no means an exag- 
geration to say that these things were done 
to him, and it is true that he bore ill-will to 
no man, and that he accepted blows, and 
indignities and ridicule with the pathetic 
candour of a child who is disguised as a 
man, and whose disguise cannot come off. 
His tongue, his pen, his body, all that he 



68 The Insurrection in Dxiblin 

had and hoped for were at the immediate 
service of whoever was bewildered or op- 
pressed. He has been shot. Other men 
have been shot, but they faced the guns 
knowing that they faced justice, however 
stern and oppressive ; and that what they 
had engaged to confront was before them. 
He had no such thought to soothe from his 
mind anger or unforgiveness. He who 
was a pacifist was compelled to revolt to 
his last breath, and on the instruments of 
his end he must have looked as on murder- 
ers. I am sure that to the end he railed 
against oppression, and that he fell mar- 
velling that the world can truly be as it is. 
With his death there passed away a brave 
man and a clean soul. 

Later on this day I met Mrs. Sheehy 
Skeffington in the street. She confirmed 
the rumour that her husband had been ar- 
rested on the previous day, but further 



Thursday 69 

than that she had no news. So far as I 
know the sole crime of which her husband 
had been guilty was that he called for a 
meeting of the citizens to enrol special 
constables and prevent looting. 

Among the rumours it was stated with 
every accent of certitude that Madame 
Markieivcz had been captured in George's 
Street, and taken to the Castle. It was 
also current that Sir Roger Casement had 
been captured at sea and had already been 
shot in the Tower of London. The names 
of several Volunteer Leaders are men- 
tioned as being dead. But the surmise 
that steals timidly from one mouth flies 
boldly as a certitude from every mouth 
that repeats it, and truth itself would now 
be listened to with only a gossip's ear, 
but no person would believe a word of it. 

This night also was calm and beautiful, 
but this night was the most sinister and 



70 The Insurrection in Dublin 

woful of those that have passed. The 
sound of artillery, of rifles, machine guns, 
grenades, did not cease even for a mo- 
ment. From my window I saw a red flare 
that crept to the sky, and stole over it and 
remained there glaring ; the smoke reached 
from the ground to the clouds, and I could 
see great red sparks go soaring to enor- 
mous heights; while always, in the calm 
air, hour after hour there was the buzzing 
and rattling and thudding of guns, and, 
but for the guns, silence. 

It is in a dead silence this Insurrection 
is being fought, and one imagines what 
must be the feeling of these men, young 
for the most part, and unused to violence, 
who are submitting silently to the crash 
and flame and explosion by which they are 
surrounded. 



CHAPTER V 

FRIDAY 

This morning there are no newspapers, 
no bread, no milk, no news. The sun is 
shining, and the streets are lively but dis- 
creet. All people continue to talk to one 
another without distinction of class, but 
nobody knows what any person thinks. 
It is a little singular the number of 
people who are smiling. I fancy they 
were listening to the guns last night, and 
they are smiling this morning because the 
darkness is past, and because the sun is 
shining, and because they can move their 
limbs in space, and may talk without hav- 
ing to sink their voices to a whisper. 
Guns do not sound so bad in the day as 

71 



72 The Insurrection in Dublin 

they do at night, and no person can feel 
lonely while the sun shines. 

The men are smiling, but the women 
laugh, and their laughter does not dis- 
please, for whatever women do in what- 
ever circumstances appears to have a 
rightness of its own. It seems right that 
they should scream when danger to them- 
selves is imminent, and it seems right that 
they should laugh when the danger only 
threatens others. 

It is rumoured this morning that Sack- 
ville Street has been burned out and lev- 
elled to the ground. It is said that the 
end is in sight ; and, it is said, that matters 
are, if anything rather worse than better. 
That the Volunteers have sallied from 
some of their strongholds and entrenched 
themselves, and that in one place alone 
(the South Lotts) they have seven ma- 
chine guns. That when the houses which 



Friday 73 

they held became untenable they rushed 
out and seized other houses, and that, pur- 
suing these tactics, there seemed no reason 
to believe that the Insurrection would ever 
come to an end. That the streets are 
filled with Volunteers in plain clothes, but 
having revolvers in their pockets. That 
the streets are filled with soldiers equally 
revolvered and plain clothed, and that the 
least one says on any subject the less one 
would have to answer for. 

The feeling that I tapped was definitely 
Anti- Volunteer, but the ntfmber of people 
who would speak was few, and one re- 
garded the noncommittal folk who were so 
smiling and polite, and so prepared to 
talk, with much curiosity, seeking to read 
in their eyes, in their bearing, even in the 
cut of their clothes what might be the 
secret movements and cogitations of their 
minds. 



74 The Insurrection in Dublin 

ft 

I received the impression that numbers 
of them did not care a rap what way it 
went; and that others had ceased to be 
mental creatures and were merely ma- 
chines for registering the sensations of 
the time. 

None of these people were prepared for 
Insurrection. The thing had been sprung 
on them so suddenly that they were un- 
able to take sides, and their feeling of de- 
tachment w r as still so complete that they 
would have betted on the business as if it 
had been a horse race or a dog fight. 

Many English troops have. been landed 
each night, and it is believed that there 
are more than sixty thousand soldiers in 
Dublin alone, and that they are supplied 
with every offensive contrivance which 
military art has invented. 

Merrion Square is strongly held by the 
soldiers. They are posted along both 



Friday 75 

sides of the road at intervals of about 
twenty paces, and their guns are continu- 
ally barking up at the roofs which sur- 
round them in the great square. It is 
said that these roofs are held by the Volun- 
teers from Mount Street Bridge to the 
Square, and that they hold in like manner 
wide stretches of the City. 

They appear to have mapped out the 
roofs with all the thoroughness that had 
hitherto been expended on the roads, and 
upon these roofs they are so mobile and 
crafty and so much at home that the work 
of the soldiers will be exceedingly difficult 
as well as dangerous. 

Still, and notwithstanding, men can only 
take to the roofs for a short time. Up 
there, there can be no means of transport, 
and their ammunition, as well as their 
food, will very soon be used up. It is the 
beginning of the end, and the fact that 



76 The Insurrection in Dublin 

they have to take to the roofs, even though 
that be in their programme, means that 
they are finished. 

From the roof there comes the sound of 
machine guns. Looking towards Sack- 
ville Street one picks out easily Nelson's 
Pillar, which towers slenderly over all the 
buildings of the neighbourhood. It is 
wreathed in smoke. Another towering 
building was the D.B.C. Cafe. Its Chi- 
nese-like pagoda was a landmark easily 
to be found, but to-day I could not find it. 
It was not there, and I knew that, even if 
all Sackville Street was not burned down, 
as rumour insisted, this great Cafe had 
certainly been curtailed by its roof and 
might, perhaps, have been completely 
burned. 

On the gravel paths I found pieces of 
charred and burnt paper. These scraps 
must have been blown remarkably high to 



Friday 77 

have crossed all the roofs that lie between 
Sackville Street and Merrion Square. 

At eleven o'clock there is continuous fir- 
ing, and snipers firing from the direction 
of Mount Street, and in every direction 
of the City these sounds are being dupli- 
cated. 

In Camden Street the sniping and cas- 
ualties are said to have been very heavy. 
One man saw two Volunteers taken from a 
house by the soldiers. They were placed 
kneeling in the centre of the road, and 
within one minute of their capture they 
were dead. Simultaneously there fell 
several of the firing party. 

An officer in this part had his brains 
blown into the roadway. A young girl 
ran into the road picked up his cap and 
scraped the brains into it. She covered 
this poor debris with a little straw, and 
carried the hat piously to the nearest hos- 



78 The Insurrection in Dublin 

pital in order that the brains might be 
buried with their owner. 

The continuation of her story was less 
gloomy although it affected the teller 
equally. 

' ' There is not," said she, "a cat or a 
dog left alive in Camden Street. They 
are lying stiff out in the road and up on 
the roofs. There's lots of women will be 
sorry for this war," said she, "and their 
pets killed on them." 

In many parts of the City hunger began 
to be troublesome. A girl told me that her 
family, and another that had taken refuge 
with them, had eaten nothing for three 
days. On this day her father managed 
to get two loaves of bread somewhere, and 
he brought these home. 

"When," said the girl, "my father came 
in with the bread the whole fourteen of 
us ran at him, and in a minute we were 



Friday 79 

all ashamed for the loaves were gone to 
the last crumb, and we were all as hun- 
gry as we had been before he came in. 
The poor man/' said she, "did not even 
get a bit for himself." She held that 
the poor people were against the Volun- 
teers. 

The Volunteers still hold Jacob's Bis- 
cuit Factory. It is rumoured that a 
priest visited them and counselled surren- 
der, and they replied that they did not go 
there to surrender but to be killed. They 
asked him to give them absolution, and the 
story continues that he refused to do so — 
but this is not (in its latter part) a story 
that can easily be credited. The Adelaide 
Hospital is close to this factory, and it 
is possible that the proximity of the hos- 
pital, delays or hinders military operations 
against the factory. 
- Rifle volleys are continuous about Mer- 



80 The Insurrection in Dublin 

rion Square, and prolonged machine gun 
firing can be heard also. 

During the night the firing was heavy 
from almost every direction; and in the 
direction of Sackville Street a red glare 
told again of fire. 

It is hard to get to bed these nights. It 
is hard even to sit down, for the moment 
one does sit down one stands immediately 
up again resinning that ridiculous ship's 
march from the window to the wall and 
back. I am foot weary as I have never 
been before in my life, but I cannot say 
that I am excited. No person in Dublin 
is excited, but there exists a state of ten- 
sion and expectancy which is mentally 
more exasperating than any excitement 
could be. The absence of news is largely 
responsible for this. We do not know 
what has happened, what is happening, or 
what is going to happen, and the reversion 



Friday 81 

to barbarism (for barbarism is largely a 
lack of news) disturbs us. 

Each night we have got to bed at last 
murmuring, "I wonder will it be all over 
to-morrow," and this night the like ques- 
tion accompanied us. 



CHAPTER VI 

SATURDAY 

This morning also there has been no 
bread, no milk, no meat, no newspapers, 
but the sun is shining. It is astonishing 
that, thus early in the Spring, the weather 
should be so beautiful. 

It is stated freely that the Post Office 
has been taken, and just as freely it is 
averred that it has not been taken. The 
approaches to Merrion Square are held by 
the military, and I was not permitted to 
go to my office. As I came to this point 
shots were fired at a motor car which had 
not stopped on being challenged. By- 
standers said it was Sir Horace Plunkett's 
car, and that he had been shot. Later we 

82 



Saturday 83 

found that Sir Horace was not hurt, but 
that his nephew who drove the car had 
been severely wounded. 

At this hour the rumour of the fall of 
Verdun was persistent. Later on it was 
denied, as was denied the companion 
rumour of the relief of Kut. Saw E. who 
had spent three days and the whole of his 
money in getting home from County Clare. 
He had heard that Mrs. Sheehy Skeffing- 
ton's house was raided, and that two dead 
bodies had been taken out of it. Saw 
Miss P. who seemed sad. I do not know 
what her politics are, but I think that the 
word " kindness" might be used to cover 
all her activities. She has a heart of gold, 
and the courage of many lions. I then 
met Mr. Commissioner Bailey who said 
the Volunteers had sent a deputation, and 
that terms of surrender were being dis- 
cussed. I hope this is true, and I hope 



84 The Insurrection in Dublin 

mercy will be shown to the men. Nobody 
believes there will be any mercy shown, 
and it is freely reported that they are shot 
in the street, or are taken to the nearest 
barracks and shot there. The belief 
grows that no person who is now in the 
Insurrection will be alive when the Insur- 
rection is ended. 

That is as it will be. But these days 
the thought of death does not strike on the 
mind with any severity, and, should the 
European war continue much longer, the 
fear of death will entirely depart from 
man, as it has departed many times in his- 
tory. With that great deterrent gone our 
rulers will be gravely at a loss in dealing 
with strikers and other such discontented 
people. Possibly they will have to resur- 
rect the long-buried idea of torture. 

The people in the streets are laughing 
and chatting. Indeed, there is gaiety in 



Saturday 85 

the air as well as sunshine, and no person 
seems to care that men are being shot 
every other minute, or bayonetted, or 
blown into scraps or burned into cinders. 
These things are happening, nevertheless, 
but much of their importance has van- 
ished. 

I met a man at the Green who was draw- 
ing a plan on the back of an envelope. 
The problem was how his questioner was 
to get from where he was standing to a 
street lying at the other side of the river, 
and the plan as drawn insisted that to 
cover this quarter of an hour's distance 
he must set out on a pilgrimage of more 
than twenty miles. Another young boy 
was standing near embracing a large ham. 
He had been trying for three days to con- 
vey his ham to a house near the Gresham 
Hotel where his sister lived. He had al- 
most given up hope, .and he hearkened in- 



86 The Insurrection in Dublin 

telligently to the idea that he should him- 
self eat the ham and so get rid of it. 

The rifle fire was persistent all day, but, 
saving in certain localities, it was not 
heavy. Occasionally the machine guns 
rapped in. There was no sound of heavy 
artillery. 

The rumour grows that the Post Office 
has been evacuated, and that the Volun- 
teers are at large and spreading every- 
where across the roofs. The rumour 
grows also that terms of surrender are 
being discussed, and that Sackville Street 
has been levelled to the ground. 

At half -past seven in the evening calm 
is almost complete. The sound of a rifle 
shot being only heard at long intervals. 

I got to bed this night earlier than usual. 
At two o'clock I left the window from 
which a red flare is yet visible in the direc- 
tion of Sackville Street. The morning 



Saturday 87 

will tell if the Insurrection is finished or 
not, but at this hour all is not over. Shots 
are ringing all around and down my street, 
and the vicious crackling of these rifles 
grow at times into regular volleys. 



CHAPTER VII 

SUNDAY 

The Insurrection has not ceased. 

There is much rifle fire, but no sound 
from the machine guns or the eighteen 
pounders and trench mortars. 

From the window of my kitchen the flag 
of the Republic can be seen flying afar. 
This is the flag that flies over Jacob's Bis- 
cuit Factory, and I will know that the In- 
surrection has ended as soon as I see this 
flag pulled down. 

When I went out there were few people 
in the streets. I met D. H., and, together, 
we passed up the Green. The Republi- 
can flag was still flying over the College 
of Surgeons. We tried to get down Graf- 



Sunday 89 

ton Street (where broken windows and 
two gaping interiors told of the recent 
visit of looters), but a little down this 
street we were waved back by armed sen- 
tries. We then cut away by the Gaiety 
Theatre into Mercer's Street, where im- 
mense lines of poor people w T ere drawn up 
waiting for the opening of the local bak- 
ery. We got into George's Street, think- 
ing to turn down Dame Street and get 
from thence near enough to Sackville 
Street to see if the rumours about its de- 
struction were true, but here also we were 
halted by the military, and had to retrace 
our steps. 

There was no news of any kind to be 
gathered from the people we talked to, 
nor had they even any rumours. 

This was the first day I had been able 
to get even a short distance outside of my 
own quarter, and it seemed that the people 



90 The Insurrection in Dublin 

of my quarter were more able in the manu- 
facture of news or more imaginative than 
were the people who live in other parts of 
the city. We had no sooner struck into 
home parts than we found news. We 
were told that two of the Volunteer lead- 
ers had been shot. These were Pearse and 
Connolly. The latter was reported as ly- 
ing in the Castle Hospital with a fractured 
thigh. Pearse was cited as dead with two 
hundred of his men, following their sally 
from the Post Office. The machine guns 
had caught them as they left, and none of 
them remained alive. The news seemed 
afterwards to be true except that instead 
of Pearse it was The O'Kahilly who had 
been killed. Pearse died later and with 
less excitement. 

A man who had seen an English news- 
paper said that the Kut force had surren- 
dered to the Turk, but that Verdun had 



Sunday 91 

not fallen to the Germans. The rumour 
was current also that a great naval battle 
had been fought whereat the German fleet 
had been totally destroyed with loss to the 
English of eighteen warships. It was 
said that among the captured Volunteers 
there had been a large body of Germans, 
but nobody believed it; and this rumour 
was inevitably followed by the tale that 
there were one hundred German subma- 
rines lying in the Stephen's Green pond. 
At half-past two I met Mr. Commis- 
sioner Bailey, who told me that it was all 
over, and that the Volunteers were sur- 
rendering everywhere in the city. A 
motor car with two military officers, and 
two Volunteer leaders had driven to the 
College of Surgeons and been admitted. 
After a short interval Madame Marckie- 
vicz marched out of the College at the 
head of about 100 men, and they had given 



92 The Insurrection in Dublin 

up their arms ; the motor car with the Vol- 
unteer leaders was driving to other strong- 
holds, and it was expected that before 
nightfall the capitulations would be com- 
plete. 

I started home, and on the way I met a 
man whom I had encountered some days 
previously, and from whom rumours had 
sprung as though he wove them from his 
entrails, as a spider weaves his web. He 
was no less provided on this occasion, and 
it was curious to listen to his tale of Eng- 
lish defeats on every front. He an- 
nounced the invasion of England in six 
different quarters, the total destruction 
of the English fleet, and the landing of im- 
mense German armies on the West coast 
of Ireland. He made these things up in 
his head. Then he repeated them to him- 
self in a loud voice, and became somehow 



Sunday 93 

persuaded that they had been told to him 
by a well-informed stranger, and then he 
believed them and told them to everybody 
he met. Amongst other things Spain had 
declared war on our behalf, the Chilian 
Navy was hastening to our relief. For a 
pin he would have sent France flying west- 
ward all forgetful of her own war. A 
singular man truly, and as I do think the 
only thoroughly happy person in our city. 
It is half -past three o'clock, and from 
my window the Republican flag can still 
be seen flying over Jacob's factory. 
There is occasional shooting, but the city 
as a whole is quiet. At a quarter to five 
o'clock a heavy gun boomed once. Ten 
minutes later there was heavy machine 
gun firing and much rifle shooting. In 
another ten minutes the flag at Jacob's 
was hauled down. 



94 The Insurrection in Dublin 

During the remainder of the night snip- 
ing and military replies were incessant, 
particularly in my street. 

The raids have begun in private houses. 
Count Plunkett's house was entered by 
the military who remained there for a very 
long time. Passing home about two min- 
utes after Proclamation hour I was pur- 
sued for the whole of Fitzwilliam Square 
by bullets. They buzzed into the roadway 
beside me, and the sound as they whistled 
near was curious. The sound is some- 
thing like that made by a very swift saw, 
and one gets the impression that as well 
as being very swift they are very heavy. 

Snipers are undoubtedly on the roofs 
opposite my house, and they are not asleep 
on these roofs. Possibly it is difficult to 
communicate with these isolated bands 
the news of their companions' surrender, 
but it is likely they will learn, by the 



Sunday 95 

diminution of fire in other quarters that 
their work is over. 

In the morning on looking from my win- 
day I saw four policemen marching into 
the street. They were the first I had seen 
for a week. Soon now the military tale 
will finish, the police story will commence, 
the political story will recommence, and, 
perhaps, the weeks that follow this one 
will sow the seed of more hatred than so 
many centuries will be able to uproot 
again, for although Irish people do not 
greatly fear the military they fear the 
police, and they have very good reason to 
do so. 



CHAPTER VIII 

THE INSURRECTION IS OVER! 

The Insurrection is over, and it is worth 
asking what has happened, how it has hap- 
pened, and why it happened? 

The first question is easily answered. 
The finest part of our city has been blown 
to smithereens, and burned into ashes. 
Soldiers amongst us who have served 
abroad say that the ruin of this quarter is 
more complete than anything they have 
seen at Ypres, than anything they have 
seen anywhere in Prance or Planders. A 
great number of our men and women and 
children, Volunteers and civilians con- 
founded alike, are dead, and some fifty 

96 



The Insurrection is Over! 97 
thousand men who have been moved with 
military equipment to our land are now 
being removed therefrom. The English 
nation has been disorganised no more than 
as they were affected by the transport of 
these men and material. That is what 
happened, and it is all that happened. 

How it happened is another matter, and 
one which, perhaps, will not be made clear 
for years. All we know in Dublin is that 
our city burst into a kind of spontaneous 
war; that we lived through it during one 
singular week, and that it faded away and 
disappeared almost as swiftly as it had 
come. The men who knew about it are, 
with two exceptions, dead, and these two 
exceptions are in gaol, and likely to remain 
there long enough. (Since writing one of 
these men has been- shot.) 

Why it happened is a question that may 
be answered more particularly. It hap- 



98 The Insurrection in Dublin 

pened because the leader of the Irish 
Party misrepresented his people in the 
English House of Parliament. On the 
day of the declaration of war between 
England and Germany he took the Irish 
case, weighty with eight centuries of his- 
tory and tradition, and he threw it out of 
the window. He pledged Ireland to a par- 
ticular course of action, and he had no 
authority to give this pledge and he had 
no guarantee that it would be met. The 
ramshackle intelligence of his party and 
his own emotional nature betrayed him 
and us and England. He swore Ireland 
to loyalty as if he had Ireland in his 
pocket, and could answer for her. Ire- 
land has never been disloyal to England, 
not even at this epoch, because she has 
never been loyal to England, and the pro- 
fession of her National faith has been un- 
wavering, has been known to every Eng- 



The Insurrection is Over! 99 

lish person alive, and has been clamant to 
all the world beside. 

Is it that he wanted to be cheered I He 
could very easily have stated Ireland's 
case truthfully, and have proclaimed a 
benevolent neutrality (if he cared to use 
the grandiloquent words) on the part of 
this country. He would have gotten his 
cheers, he would in a few months have got- 
ten Home Eule in return for Irish sol- 
diers. He would have received politically 
whatever England could have safely given 
him. But, alas, these carefulnesses did 
not chime with his emotional moment. 
They were not magnificent enough for one 
who felt that he was talking not to Ireland 
or to England, but to the whole gaping and 
eager earth, and so he pledged his coun- 
try's credit so deeply that he did not leave 
her even one National rag to cover herself 
with. 



100 The Insurrection in Dublin 

After a lie truth bursts out, and it is no 
longer the radiant and serene goddess we 
knew or hoped for — it is a disease, it is a 
moral syphilis and will ravage until the 
body in which it can dwell has been 
purged. Mr. Redmond told the lie and he 
is answerable to England for the violence 
she had to be guilty of, and to Ireland for 
the desolation to which we have had to 
submit. Without his lie there had been 
no Insurrection ; without it there had been 
at this moment, and for a year past, an 
end to the "Irish question." Ireland 
must in ages gone have been guilty of 
abominable crimes or she could not at this 
juncture have been afflicted with a John 
Redmond. 

He is the immediate cause of this our 
latest Insurrection — the word is big, much 
too big for the deed, and we should call it 
row, or riot, or squabble, in order to draw 



The Insurrection is Over! 101 

the fact down to its dimensions, but the ul- 
timate blame for the trouble between the 
two countries does not fall against Ire- 
land. 

The fault lies with England, and in 
these days while an effort is being made 
(interrupted, it is true, by cannon) to 
found a better understanding between the 
two nations it is well that England should 
recognise what she has done to Ireland, 
and should try at least to atone for it. 
The situation can be explained almost in 
a phrase. We are a little country and 
you, a huge country, have persistently 
beaten us. We are a poor country and 
you, the richest country in the world, have 
persistently robbed us. That is the his- 
torical fact, and whatever national or po- 
litical necessities are opposed in reply, it 
is true that you have never given Ireland 
any reason to love you, and you cannot 



102 The Insurrection in Dublin 

claim her affection without hypocrisy or 
stupidity. 

You think our people can only be tena- 
cious in hate — it is a lie. Our historical 
memory is truely tenacious, but during the 
long and miserable tale of our relations 
you have never given us one generosity to 
remember you by, and you must not claim 
our affection or our devotion until you are 
worthy of them. We are a good people ; 
almost we are the only Christian people 
left in the world, nor has any nation shown 
such forbearance towards their persecutor 
as we have always shown to you. No na- 
tion has forgiven its enemies as we have 
forgiven you, time after time down the 
miserable generations, the continuity of 
our forgiveness only equalled by the con- 
tinuity of your ill-treatment. Between 
our two countries you have kept and pro- 
tected a screen of traders and politicians 



The Insurrection is Over! 103 

who are just as truly your enemies as they 
are ours. In the end they will do most 
harm to you for we are by this vaccinated 
against misery but you are not, and the 
" loyalists" who sell their own country for 
a shilling will sell another country for a 
penny when the opportunity comes and 
safety with it. 

Meanwhile do not always hasten your 
presents to us out of a gun. You have 
done it so often that your guns begin to 
bore us, and you have now an opportunity 
which may never occur again to make us 
your friends. There is no bitterness in 
Ireland against you on account of this war, 
and the lack of ill-feeling amongst us is 
entirely due to the more than admirable 
behaviour of the soldiers whom you sent 
over here. A peace that will last for ever 
can be made with Ireland if you wish to 
make it, but you must take her hand at 



104 The Insurrection in Dublin 

once, for in a few months' time she will 
not open it to you; the old, bad relations 
will re-commence, the rancour will be born 
and grow, and another memory will be 
stored away in Ireland's capacious and re- 
tentive brain. 



CHAPTER IX 

THE VOLUNTEERS 

There is much talk of the extraordinary 
organising powers displayed in the insur- 
rection, but in truth there was nothing ex- 
traordinary in it. The real essence and 
singularity of the rising exists in its sim- 
plicity, and, saving for the courage which 
carried it out, the word extraordinary is 
misplaced in this context. 

The tactics of the Volunteers as they be- 
gan to emerge were reduced to the very 
skeleton of " strategy." It was only that 
they seized certain central and strategical 
districts, garrisoned those and held them 
until they were put out of them. Once in 
their forts there was no further egress by 

105 



106 The Insurrection in Dublin 

the doors, and for purpose of entry and 
sortie they used the sky-lights and the 
roofs. On the roofs they had plenty of 
cover, and this cover conferred on them a 
mobility which was their chief asset, and 
which alone enabled them to protract the 
rebellion beyond the first day. 

This was the entire of their home plan, 
and there is no doubt that they had studied 
Dublin roofs and means of inter-communi- 
cation by roofs with the closest care. 
Further than that I do not think they had 
organised anything. But this was only 
the primary plan, and, unless they were 
entirely mad, there must have been a 
sequel to it which did not materialise, and 
which would have materialised but that 
the English Fleet blocked the way. 

There is no doubt that they expected the 
country to rise with them, and they must 
have known what their own numbers were, 



The Volunteers 107 

and what chance they had of making a pro- 
tracted resistance. The word " resist- 
ance" is the keyword of the rising, and 
the plan of holding out must have been 
rounded off with a date. At that date 
something else was to have happened 
which would relieve them. 

There is not much else that could hap- 
pen except the landing of German troops 
in Ireland or in England. It w T ould have 
been, I think, immaterial to them where 
these w T ere landed, but the reasoning seems 
to point to the fact that they expected 
and had arranged for such a landing, al- 
though on this point there is as yet no evi- 
dence. 

The logic of this is so simple, so plausi- 
ble, that it might be accepted without 
further examination, and yet further ex- 
amination is necessary, for in a country 
like Ireland logic and plausibility are more 



108 The Insurrection in Dublin 

often wrong than right. It may just as 
easily be that except for furnishing some 
arms and ammunition Germany was not 
in the rising at all, and this I prefer to 
believe. It had been current long before 
the rising that the Volunteers knew they 
could not seriously embarrass England, 
and that their sole aim was to make such a 
row in Ireland that the Irish question 
would take the status of an international 
one, and on the discussion of terms of 
peace in the European war the claims of 
Ireland would have to be considered by 
the whole Council of Europe and the 
world. 

That is, in my opinion, the metaphysic 
behind the rising. It is quite likely that 
they hoped for German aid, possibly some 
thousands of men, who would enable them 
to prolong the row, but I do not believe 
they expected German armies, nor do I 



The Volunteers 109 

think they would have welcomed these with 
any cordiality. 

In this insurrection there are two things 
which are singular in the history of Irish 
risings. One is that there were no in- 
formers, or there were no informers among 
the chiefs. I did hear people say in the 
streets that two days before the rising they 
knew it was to come ; they invariably added 
that they had not believed the news, and 
had laughed at it. A priest said the same 
thing in my hearing, and it may be that 
the rumour was widely spread, and that 
everybody, including the authorities, 
looked upon it as a joke. 

The other singularity of the rising is the 
amazing silence in which it was fought. 
Nothing spoke but the guns ; and the Vol- 
unteers on the one side and the soldiers on 
the other potted each other and died in 
whispers ; it might have been said that both 



110 The Insurrection in Dublin 

sides feared the Germans would hear them 
and take advantage of their preoccupa- 
tion. 

There is a third reason given for the re- 
bellion, and it also is divorced from foreign 
plots. It is said, and the belief in Dublin 
was widespread, that the Government in- 
tended to raid the Volunteers and seize 
their arms. One remembers to-day the 
paper which Alderman Kelly read to the 
Dublin Corporation, and which purported 
to be State Instructions that the Military 
and Police should raid the Volunteers, and 
seize their arms and leaders. The Volun- 
teers had sworn they would not permit 
their arms to be taken from them. A list 
of the places to be raided was given, and 
the news created something of a sensation 
in Ireland when it was published that eve- 
ning. The Press, by instruction appar- 
ently, repudiated this document, but the 



The Volunteers 111 

Volunteers, with most of the public, be- 
lieved it to be true, and it is more than 
likely that the rebellion took place in order 
to forestall the Government. 

This is also an explanation of the rebel- 
lion, and is just as good a one as any other. 
It is the explanation which I believe to be 
the true one. 

All the talk of German invasion and the 
landing of German troops in Ireland is so 
much nonsense in view of the fact that 
England is master of the seas, and that 
from a week before the war down to this 
date she has been the undisputed monarch 
of those ridges. During this war there 
will be no landing of troops in either Eng- 
land or Ireland unless Germany in the 
meantime can solve the problem of sub- 
marine transport. It is a problem which 
will be solved some day, for every problem 
can be solved, but it will hardly be during 



112 The Insurrection in Dublin 

the progress of this war. The men at the 
head of the Volunteers were not geniuses, 
neither were they fools, and the difficulty 
of acquiring military aid from Germany 
must have seemed as insurmountable to 
them as it does to the Germans themselves. 
They rose because they felt that they had 
to do so, or be driven like sheep into the 
nearest police barracks, and be laughed at 
by the whole of Ireland as cowards and 
braggarts. 

It would be interesting to know why, on 
the eve of the insurrection, Professor Mac- 
Neill resigned the presidency of the Volun- 
teers. The story of treachery which was 
heard in the streets is not the true one, for 
men of his type are not traitors, and this 
statement may be dismissed without fur- 
ther comment or notice. One is left to 
imagine what can have happened during 
the conference which is said to have pre- 



The Volunteers 113 

ceded the rising, and which ended with the 
resignation of Professor MacNeill. 

This is my view, or my imagining, of 
what occurred. The conference was 
called because the various leaders felt that 
a hostile movement was projected by the 
Government, and that the times were ex- 
ceedingly black for them. Neither Mr. 
Birrell nor Sir Mathew Nathan had any 
desire that there should be a conflict in 
Ireland during the war. This cannot be 
doubted. From such a conflict there 
might follow all kinds of political reper- 
cussions; but although the Government 
favoured the policy of laissez faire, there 
was a powerful military and political 
party in Ireland whose whole effort was 
towards the disarming and punishment of 
the Volunteers — particularly I should say 
the punishment of the Volunteers. I be- 
lieve, or rather I imagine, that Professor 



114 The Insurrection in Dublin 

MacNeill was approached at the instance 
of Mr. Birrell or Sir Mathew Nathan and 
assured that the Government did not medi- 
tate any move against his men, and that 
so long as his Volunteers remained quiet 
they would not be molested by the authori- 
ties. I would say that Professor Mac- 
Neill gave and accepted the necessary as- 
surances, and that when he informed his 
conference of what had occurred, and 
found that they did not believe faith would 
be kept with them, he resigned in the de- 
spairing hope that his action might turn 
them from a purpose which he considered 
lunatic, or, at least, by restraining a num- 
ber of his followers from rising, he might 
limit the tale of men who would be use- 
lessly killed. 

He was not alone in his vote against a 
rising. The O'Eahilly and some others 
are reputed to have voted with him, but 



The Volunteers 115 

when insurrection was decided on, The 
O'Bahilly marched with his men, and 
surely a gallant man could not have done 
otherwise. 

When the story of what occurred is au- 
thoritatively written (it may be written) 
I think that this will be found to be the 
truth of the matter, and that German in- 
trigue and German money counted for so 
little in the insurrection as to be negligible. 



CHAPTER X 

SOME OF THE LEADERS 

Meanwhile the Insurrection, like all its 
historical forerunners, has been quelled in 
blood. It sounds rhetorical to say so, but 
it was not quelled in peasoup or tisane. 
While it lasted the fighting was very de- 
termined, and it is easily, I think, the most 
considerable of Irish rebellions. 

The country was not with it, for be it re- 
membered that a whole army of Irishmen, 
possibly three hundred thousand of our 
race, are fighting with England instead of 
against her. In Dublin alone there is 
scarcely a poor home in which a father, a 
brother, or a son is not serving in one of 
the many fronts which England is defend- 
ing. Had the country risen, and fought as 

116 



Some of the Leaders 117 

stubbornly as the Volunteers did, no 
troops could have beaten them — well that 
is a wild statement, the heavy guns could 
always beat them — but from whatever 
angle Irish people consider this affair it 
must appear to them tragic and lamenta- 
ble beyond expression, but not mean and 
not unheroic. 

It was hard enough that our men in the 
English armies should be slain for causes 
which no amount of explanation will ever 
render less foreign to us, or even intelligi- 
ble ; but that our men who were left should 
be killed in Ireland fighting against the 
same England that their brothers are fight- 
ing for ties the question into such knots of 
contradiction as we may give up trying to 
unravel. We can only think — this has 
happened — and let it unhappen itself as 
best it may. 

We say that the time always finds the 



118 The Insurrection in Dublin 

man, and by it we mean : that when a re- 
sponsibility is toward there will be found 
some shoulder to bend for the yoke which 
all others shrink from. It is not always 
nor often the great ones of the earth who 
undertake these burdens — it is usually the 
good folk, that gentle hierarchy who swear 
allegiance to mournfulness and the under 
dog, as others dedicate themselves to mut- 
ton chops and the easy nymph. It is not 
my intention to idealise any of the men 
who were concerned in this rebellion. 
Their country will, some few years hence, 
do that as adequately as she has done it for 
those who went before them. 

Those of the leaders whom I knew were 
not great men, nor brilliant — that is they 
were more scholars than thinkers, and 
more thinkers than men of action ; and I 
believe that in no capacity could they have 



Some of the Leaders 119 

attained to what is called eminence, nor do 
I consider they coveted any such public 
distinction as is noted in that word. 

But in my definition they were good men 
— men, that is, who willed no evil, and 
whose movements of body or brain were 
unselfish and healthy. No person living 
is the worse off for having known Thomas 
MacDonagh, and I, at least, have never 
heard MacDonagh speak unkindly or even 
harshly of anything that lived. It has 
been said of him that his lyrics were epi- 
cal ; in a measure it is true and it is true in 
the same measure that his death was epi- 
cal. He was the first of the leaders who 
was tried and shot. It was not easy for 
him to die leaving behind two young chil- 
dren and a young wife, and the thought 
that his last moment must have been tor- 
mented by their memory is very painful. 



120 The Insurrection in Dublin 

We are all fatalists when we strike against 
power, and I hope he put care from him 
as the soldiers marched him out. 

The O 'Rahilly also I knew, but not inti- 
mately, and I can only speak of a good 
humour, a courtesy, and an energy that 
never failed. He was a man of unceasing 
ideas and unceasing speech, and laughter 
accompanied every sound made by his lips. 

Plunkett and Pearse I knew also, but 
not intimately. Young Plunkett, as he 
w T as always called, would never strike one 
as a militant person. He, like Pearse and 
MacDonagh, wrote verse, and it was no 
better nor worse than their 's were. He 
had an appetite for quaint and difficult 
knowledge. He studied Egyptian and 
Sanscrit, and distant curious matter of 
that sort, and was interested in inventions 
and the theatre. He was tried and sen- 
tenced and shot. 



Some of the Leaders 121 

As to Pearse, I do not know how to place 
him, nor what to say of him. If there was 
an idealist among the men concerned in 
this insurrection it was he, and if there 
was any person in the world less fitted to 
head an insurrection it was he also. I 
never could " touch" or sense in him the 
qualities which other men spoke of, and 
which made him military commandant of 
the rising. None of these men were mag- 
netic in the sense that Mr. Larkin is mag- 
netic, and I would have said that Pearse 
was less magnetic than any of the others. 
Yet it was to him and around him they 
clung. 

Men must find some centre either of 
power or action or intellect about which 
they may group themselves, and I think 
that Pearse became the leader because his 
temperament was more profoundly emo- 
tional than any of the others. He was 



122 The Insurrection in Dublin 

emotional not in a flighty, but in a serious 
way, and one felt more that he suffered 
than that he enjoyed. 

He had a power ; men who came into in- 
timate contact with him began to act dif- 
ferently to their own desires and interests. 
His schoolmasters did not always receive 
their salaries with regularity. The reason 
that he did not pay them was the simple 
one that he had no money. Given by an- 
other man this explanation would be un- 
economic, but from him it was so logical 
that even a child could comprehend it. 
These masters did not always leave him. 
They remained, marvelling perhaps, and 
accepting, even with stupefaction, the the- 
ory that children must be taught, but that 
no such urgency is due towards the pay- 
ment of wages. One of his boys said there 
was no fun in telling lies to Mr. Pearse, 
for, however outrageous the lie, he always 



Some of the Leaders 123 

believed it. He built and renovated and 
improved his school because the results 
were good for his scholars, and somehow 
he found builders to undertake these for- 
lorn hopes. 

It was not, I think, that he "put his 
trust in God," but that when something 
had to be done he did it, and entirely dis- 
regarded logic or economics or force. He 
said — such a thing has to be done and so 
far as one man can do it I will do it, and 
he bowed straightaway to the task. 

It is mournful to think of men like these 
having to take charge of bloody and deso- 
late work, and one can imagine them say, 
"Oh! cursed spite," as they accepted re- 
sponsibility. 



CHAPTER XI 

LABOUR AND THE INSURRECTION 

No person in Ireland seems to have exact 
information about the Volunteers, their 
aims, or their numbers. We know the 
names of the leaders now. They were re- 
cited to us with the tale of their execution ; 
and with the declaration of a Republic we 
learned something of their aim, but the 
estimate of their number runs through the 
figures ten, thirty, and fifty thousand. 
The first figure is undoubtedly too slender, 
the last excessive, and something between 
fifteen and twenty thousand for all Ire- 
land would be a reasonable guess. 

Of these, the Citizen Army or Labour 
side of the Volunteers, would not number 
more than one thousand men, and it is 

124 



Labour and the Insurrection 125 

with difficulty such a figure could be ar- 
rived at. Yet it is freely argued, and the 
theory will grow, that the causes of this 
latest insurrection should be sought among 
the labour problems of Dublin rather than 
in any national or patriotic sentiment, and 
this theory is buttressed by all the* agile 
facts which such a theory would be fur- 
nished with. 

It is an interesting view, but in my opin- 
ion it is an erroneous one. 

That Dublin labour was in the Volun- 
teer movement to the strength of, perhaps, 
two hundred men, may be true — it is pos- 
sible there were more, but it is unlikely 
that a greater number, or, as many, of the 
Citizen Army marched when the order 
came. The overwhelming bulk of Volun- 
teers were actuated by the patriotic ideal 
which is the heritage and the burden of 
almost every Irishman born out 'of the 



126 The Insurrection in Dublin 

Unionist circle, and their connection with 
labour was much more manual than 
mental. 

This view of the importance of labour to 
the Volunteers is held by two distinct and 
opposed classes. 

Just as there are some who find the ex- 
planation of life in a sexual formula, so 
there is a class to whom the economic idea 
is very dear, and beneath every human ac- 
tivity they will discover the shock of wages 
and profit. It is truly there, but it pulls 
no more than its weight, and in Irish life 
the part played by labour has not yet been 
a weighty one, although on every view it 
is an important one. The labour idea in 
Ireland has not arrived. It is in process 
of " becoming," and when labour problems 
are mentioned in this country a party does 
not come to mind, but two men only — they 
are Mr. Larkin and James Connolly, and 



Labour and the Insurrection 127 

they are each in their way exceptional and 
curious men. 

There is another class who implicate 
labour, and they do so because it enables 
them to urge that as well as being grasping 
and nihilistic, Irish labour is disloyal and 
treacherous. 

The truth is that labour in Ireland has 
not yet succeeded in organising anything 
—not even discontent. It is not self-con- 
scious to any extent, and, outside of Dub- 
lin, it scarcely appears to exist. The na- 
tional imagination is not free to deal with 
any other subject than that of freedom, 
and part of the policy of our "masters" is 
to see that we be kept busy with politics 
instead of social ideas. From their stand- 
point the policy is admirable, and up to 
the present it has thoroughly succeeded. 

One does not hear from the lips of the 
Irish workingman, even in Dublin, any of 



128 The Insurrection in Dublin 

the affirmations and rejections which have 
long since become the commonplaces of 
his comrades in other lands. But on the 
subject of Irish freedom his views are in- 
stantty forthcoming, and his desires are 
explicit, and, to a degree, informed. 
This latter subject they understand and 
have fabricated an entire language to ex- 
press it, but the other they do not under- 
stand nor cherish, and they are not pre- 
pared to die for it. 

It is possibly true that before any move- 
ment can attain to really national propor- 
tions there must be, as well as the intellec- 
tual ideal which gives it utterance and a 
frame, a sense of economic misfortune to 
give it weight, and when these fuse the 
combination may well be irresistible. The 
organised labour discontent in Ireland, in 
Dublin, was not considerable enough to 
impose its aims or its colours on the Vol- 



Labour and the Insurrection 129 
unteers, and it is the labour ideal which 
merges and disappears in the national one. 
The reputation of all the leaders of the in- 
surrection, not excepting Connolly, is that 
they were intensely patriotic Irishmen, 
and also, but this time with the exception 
of Connolly, that they were not particu- 
larly interested in the problems of labour. 
The great strike of two years ago re- 
mained undoubtedly as a bitter and last- 
ing memory with Dublin labour— perhaps, 
even, it was not so much a memory as a 
hatred. Still, it was not hatred of Eng- 
land which was evoked at that time, nor 
can the stress of their conflict be traced to 
an English source. It was hatred of local 
traders, and, particularly, hatred of the 
local police, and the local powers and 
tribunals, which were arrayed against 
them. 

One can without trouble discover rea- 



130 *The Insurrection in Dublin 

sons why they should go on strike again, 
but by no reasoning can I understand why 
they should go into rebellion against Eng- 
land, unless it was that they were patriots 
first and trade unionists a very long way 
afterwards. 

I do not believe that this combination of 
the ideal and the practical was consum- 
mated in the Dublin insurrection, but I do 
believe that the first step towards the 
formation of such a party has now been 
taken, and that if, years hence, there 
should be further trouble in Ireland such 
trouble will not be so easily dealt with as 
this one has been. 

It may be that further trouble will not 
arise, for the co-operative movement, 
which is growing slowly but steadily in 
Ireland, may arrange our economic ques- 
tion, and, incidentally, our national ques- 
tion also — that is if the English people do 



Labour and the Insurrection 131 

not decide that the latter ought to be set- 
tled at once. 

James Connolly had his heart in both 
the national and the economic camp, but he 
was a great-hearted man, and could afford 
to extend his affections where others could 
only dissipate them. 

There can be no doubt that his powers 
of orderly thinking were of great service 
to the Volunteers, for while Mr. Larkin 
was the magnetic centre of the Irish 
labour movement, Connolly was its brains. 
He has been sentenced to death for his 
part in the insurrection, and for two days 
now he has been dead. 

He had been severely wounded in the 
fighting, and was tended, one does not 
doubt with great care, until he regained 
enough strength to stand up and be shot 
down again. 

Others are dead also. I was not ac- 



132 The Insurrection in Dublin 

quainted with them, and with Connolly I 
was not more than acquainted. I had met 
him twice many months ago, but other peo- 
ple were present each time, and he scarcely 
uttered a word on either of these occasions. 
I was told that he was by nature silent. 
He was a man who can be ill-spared in Ire- 
land, but labour, throughout the world, 
may mourn for him also. 

A doctor who attended on him during 
his last hours says that Connolly received 
the sentence of his death quietly. He was 
to be shot on the morning following the 
sentence. This gentleman said to him : 

" Connolly, when you stand up to be 
shot, will you say a prayer for me?" 

Connolly replied: 

"I will" 

His visitor continued : 

"Will you say a prayer for the men who 
are shooting you?" 



Labour and the Insurrection 133 

"I will," said Connolly, "and I will say 
a prayer for every good man in the world 
who is doing his duty." 

He was a steadfast man in all that he 
undertook. We may be sure he stead- 
fastly kept that promise. He would pray 
for others, who had not time to pray for 
himself, as he had worked for others dur- 
ing the years when he might have worked 
for himself. 



CHAPTER XII 

THE IRISH QUESTIONS 

There is truly an Irish question. There 
are two Irish questions, and the most im- 
portant of them is not that which appears 
in our newspapers and in our political 
propaganda. 

The first is international, and can be 
stated shortly. It is the desire of Ireland 
to assume control of her national life. 
With this desire the English people have 
professed to be in accord, and it is at any 
rate so thoroughly understood that noth- 
ing further need be made of it in these 
pages. 

The other Irish question is different, 
and less simply described. The difficulty 



134 



The Irish Questions 135 

about it is that it cannot be approached 
until the question of Ireland's freedom 
has by some means been settled, for this 
ideal of freedom has captured the imagina- 
tion of the race. It rides Ireland like a 
nightmare, thwarting or preventing all 
civilising or cultural work in this coun- 
try, and it is not too much to say that Ire- 
land cannot even begin to live until that 
obsession and fever has come to an end, 
and her imagination has been set free to 
do the work which imagination alone can 
do — Imagination is intelligent kindness — 
we have sore need of it. 

The second question might plausibly be 
called a religious one. It has been so 
called, and, for it is less troublesome to ac- 
cept an idea than to question it, the state- 
ment has been accepted as truth — but it 
is untrue, and it is deeply and villainously 
untrue. No lie in Irish life has been so 



136 The Insurrection in Dublin 

persistent and so mischievous as this one, 
and no political lie has ever been so in- 
geniously, and malevolently exploited. 

There is no religious intolerance in Ire- 
land except that which is political. I am 
not a member of the Catholic Church, and 
am not inclined to be the advocate of a re- 
ligious system which my mentality dis- 
likes, but I have never found real intoler- 
ance among my fellow-countrymen of that 
religion. I have found it among Protest- 
ants. I will limit that statement, too. I 
have found it among some Protestants. 
But outside of the North of Ireland there 
is no religious question, and in the North 
it is fundamentally more political than re- 
ligious. 

All thinking is a fining down of one's 
ideas, and thus far we have come to the 
statement of Ireland's second question. 
It is not Catholic or Nationalist, nor have 



The Irish Questions 137 

I said that it is entirely Protestant and 
Unionist, but it is on the extreme wing of 
this latter party that responsibility must 
be laid. It is difficult, even for an Irish- 
man living in Ireland, to come on the real 
political fact which underlies Irish Prot- 
estant politics, and which fact has con- 
sistently opposed and baffled every at- 
tempt made by either England or Ireland 
to come to terms. There is such a fact, 
and clustered around it is a body of men 
whose hatred of their country is persistent 
and deadly and unexplained. 

One may make broad generalisations on 
the apparent situation and endeavour to 
solve it by those. We may say that 
loyalty to England is the true centre of 
their action. I will believe it, but only 
to a point. Loyalty to England does not 
inevitably include this active hatred, this 
blindness, this withering of all sympathy 



138 The Insurrection in Dublin 

for the people among whom one is born, 
and among whom one has lived in peace, 
for they have lived in peace amongst us. 
We may say that it is due to the idea of 
privilege and the desire for power. 
Again, I will accept it up to a point — but 
these are cultural obsessions, and they 
cease to act when the breaking-point is 
reached. 

I know of only two mental states which 
are utterly without bowels or conscience. 
These are cowardice and greed. Is it to a 
synthesis of these states that this more 
than mortal enmity may be traced? 
What do they fear, and what is it they 
covet ? What can they redoubt in a coun- 
try which is practically crimeless, or covet 
in a land that is almost as bare as a mutton 
bone ? They have mesmerised themselves, 
these men, and have imagined into our 
quiet air brigands and thugs and titans, 



The Irish Questions 139 

with all the other notabilities of a tale for 
children. 

I do not think that this either will tell 
the tale, but I do think there is a story to 
be told — I imagine an esoteric wing to the 
Unionist Party. I imagine that Party in- 
cludes a secret organisation — they may be 
Orangemen, they may be Masons, and, if 
there be such, I would dearly like to know 
what the metaphysic of their position is, 
and how they square it with any idea of 
humanity or social life. Meantime, all 
this is surmise, and I, as a novelist, have a 
notoriously flighty imagination, and am 
content to leave it at that. 

But this secondary Irish question is not 
so terrible as it appears. It is terrible 
now, it would not be terrible if Ireland 
had national independence. 

The great protection against a lie is — 
not to believe it; and Ireland, in this in- 



140 The Insurrection in Dublin 

stance, has that protection. The claims 
made by the Unionist Wing do not rely 
solely on the religious base. They use all 
the arguments. It is, according to them, 
unsafe to live in Ireland. (Let us leave 
this insurrection of a week out of the ques- 
tion.) Life is not safe in Ireland. Prop- 
erty shivers in terror of daily or nightly 
appropriation. Other, undefined, but 
even more woeful glooms and creeps, wrig- 
gle stealthily abroad. 

These things are not regarded in Ire- 
land, and, in truth, they are not meat for 
Irish consumption. Irish judges are pre- 
sented with white gloves with a regularity 
which may even be annoying to them, and 
were it not for political trouble they would 
be unable to look their salaries in the face. 
The Irish Bar almost weep in chorus at the 
words "Land Act," and stare, not dumbly, 
on destitution. These tales are meant for 



The Irish Questions 141 

England and are sent there. They will 
cease to be exported when there is no mar- 
ket for them, and these men will perhaps 
end by becoming patriotic and social when 
they learn that they do not really com- 
mand the Big Battalions. But Ireland 
has no protection against them while Eng- 
land can be thrilled by their nonsense, and 
while she is willing to pound Ireland to a 
jelly on their appeal. Her only assistance 
against them is freedom. 

There are certain simplicities upon 
which all life is based. A man finds that 
he is hungry and the knowledge enables 
him to go to work for the rest of his life. 
A man makes the discovery (it has been a 
discovery to many) that he is an Irishman, 
and the knowledge simplifies all his subse- 
quent political action. There is this com- 
fort about being an Irishman, you can be 
entirely Irish, and claim thus to be as com- 



142 The Insurrection in Dublin 

plete as a pebble or a star. But no Irish 
person can hope to be more than a muletto 
Englishman, and if that be an ambition 
and an end it is not an heroic one. 

But there is an Ulster difficulty, and no 
amount of burking it will solve it. It is 
too generally conceived among National- 
ists that the attitude of Ulster toward Ire- 
land is rooted in ignorance and bigotry. 
Allow that both of these bad parts are in- 
cluded in the Northern outlook, they do 
not explain the Ulster standpoint; and 
nothing can explain the attitude of official 
Irish vis-a-vis with Ulster. 

What has the Irish Party eyer done to 
allay Northern prejudice, or bring the dis- 
contented section into line with the rest of 
Ireland ? The answer is pathetically com- 
plete. They have done nothing. Or, if 
they have done anything, it was only that 
which would set every Northerner grind- 



The Irish Questions 143 

ing his teeth in anger. At a time when 
Orangeism was dying they raised and mar- 
shalled the Hibernians, and we have the 
Ulsterman's answer to the Hibernians in 
the situation by which we are confronted 
to-day. If the Party had even a little 
statesmanship among them they would for 
the past ten years have marched up and 
down the North explaining and mollifying 
and courting the Black Northerner. But, 
like good Irishmen, they could not tear 
themselves away from England, and they 
paraded that country where parade was 
not so urgent, and they made orations 
there until the mere accent of an Irishman 
must make Englishmen wail for very bore- 
dom. 

Some of that parade might have glad- 
dened the eyes of the Belfast citizens; a 
few of those orations might have assisted 
the men of Derry to comprehend that, for 



144 The Insurrection in Dublin 

the good of our common land, Home Rule 
and the unity of a nation was necessary if 
only to rid the country of these blatherers. 

Let the Party explain why, among their 
political duties, they neglected the duty of 
placating Ulster in their proper persons. 
Why, in short, they boycotted Ulster and 
permitted political and religious and ra- 
cial antagonism to grow inside of Ireland 
unchecked by any w r ord from them upon 
that ground. Were they afraid "nuts" 
would be thrown at them? Whatever 
they dreaded, they gave Ulster the widest 
of wide berths, and wherever else they 
were visible and audible, they were silent 
and unseen in that part of Ireland. 

The Ulster grievance is ostensibly re- 
ligious; but safeguards on this count are 
so easily created and applied that this 
issue might almost be left out of account. 
The real difficulty is economic, and it is a 



The Irish Questions 145 

tangled one. But unless profit and loss 
are immediately discernible the soul of 
man is not easily stirred by an account- 
ant's tale, and therefore the religious ban- 
ner has been waved for our kinsfolk of 
Ulster, and under the sacred emblem they 
are fighting for what some people call 
mammon, but which may be in truth just 
plain bread and butter. 

Before we can talk of Ireland a nation 
we must make her one. A nation, politi- 
cally speaking, is an aggregation of people 
whose interests are identical; and the in- 
terests of Ulster with the rest of Ireland 
rather than being identical are antagon- 
istic. It is England orders and pays for 
the Belfast ships, and it is to Britain or 
under the goodwill of the British power 
that Ulster conducts her huge woollen 
trade. Economically the rest of Ireland 
scarcely exists for Ulster, and whoever in- 



146 The Insurrection in Dublin 

sists on regarding the Northern question 
from an ideal plane is wasting his own 
time and the time of every one who listens 
to him. The safeguards which Ulster will 
demand, should events absolutely force 
her to it, may sound political or religious, 
they will be found essentially economic, 
and the root of them all will be a water- 
tight friendship with England, and any- 
thing that smells, however distantly, of 
hatred for England will be a true menace 
to Ulster. We must swallow England if 
Ulster is to swallow us, and until that fact 
becomes apparent to Ireland the Ulster 
problem cannot be even confronted, let 
alone solved. 

The words Sinn Fein mean "Our- 
selves," and it is of ourselves I write in 
this chapter. More urgent than any po- 
litical emancipation is the drawing to- 
gether of men of good will in the endeav- 



The Irish Questions 147 

our to assist their necessitous land. Our 
eyes must be withdrawn from the ends of 
the earth and fixed on that which is around 
us and which we can touch. No politician 
will talk to us of Ireland if by any trick 
he can avoid the subject. His tale is still 
of Westminster and Chimborazo and the 
Mountains of the Moon. Irishmen must 
begin to think for themselves and of them- 
selves, instead of expending energy on 
causes too distant to be assisted or hin- 
dered by them. I believe that our human 
material is as good as will be found in the 
world. No better, perhaps, but not worse. 
And I believe that all but local politics are 
unfruitful and soul-destroying. We have 
an island that is called little. — It is more 
than twenty times too spacious for our 
needs, and we will not have explored the 
last of it in our children's lifetime. We 
have more problems to resolve in our 



148 The Insurrection in Dublin 

towns and cities than many generations of 
minds will get tired of striving with. 
Here is the world, and all that perplexes 
or delights the world is here also. Noth- 
ing is lost. Not even brave men. They 
have been used. Prom this day the great 
adventure opens for Ireland. The Vol- 
unteers are dead, and the call is now for 
volunteers. 



THE END 



PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



THE following pages contain advertisements of 
Macmillan books by the same author. 



BY THE SAME AUTHOR 

The Rocky Road to Dublin 

Boards, i2mo t $1.00 

" You can afford to miss much poetry, but you cannot af- 
ford to miss James Stephens's work." — Review of Reviews. 

" James Stephens' new book of poetry has about it a danc- 
ing inspiration, a naive directness, a serene simplicity of spirit, 
that places his work near to the work of William Blake. None 
but an Irish poet can see so vividly the joy and the drollery of 
life, the sadness and the terror, and James Stephens stands 
first in the expression of these things. Here the ' happy Celt ' 
is portrayed as you have always imagined him; here is the 
best out of the green island across the sea. 

"... a genuine Irish genius, one in whose heart there 
boils and bubbles fantasy and tears, the irony that burns and a 
bitter-sweet humor that is mad." — James Huneker. 

" These little verses are as Irish as a shamrock, as fresh as 
the dew on a clover, and as individual as the song of a hermit 
thrush. Not since Stevenson's ' Child's Garden of Verse ' has 
there been anything more full of spirit of childhood." — Brook- 
lyn Eagle. 

"'The Rocky Road to Dublin,' like its predecessors, is 
mad, sane, merry, sad, and pure delight from cover to cover." 

— Congregationalist. 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York 



BY THE SAME AUTHOR 

Songs from the Clay cioth,i2mo,$i.oo 

" A charming impishness invests the poems of James Stephens, called 
' Songs from the Clay.' " — Christian Advocate. 

li The word ' pagan ' occurs not unnaturally in an attempt to catch 
his personality. There is something sunburnt and wind-touched, some- 
thing primitive and wild in his lyrics, that sets them apart and gives 
them savor. At times, his rustic pictures carry one straight back to 
Virgil's ' Eclogues,' or to Theocritus." — Bellman. 

"The tremor of wildness in nature, the glint of unseen wings, the 
beat of fairies' feet, the tune on the wind, the terror in the void — it 
is perhaps the special privilege of the Celt to discern these things ; 
but few even of the Celts have presented them with such witty brevity, 
such choice felicity of phrase, as Mr. Stephens commands from his 
happy muse." — Harriet Monroe, in " Poetry." 

" A master of clear-cut description and keen satire, James Stephens 
enlivens the one with the touch of genuine human emotion and softens 
the other with a whimsical reflection or a good-humored smile." 

— Independent. 

" In his last book of verse, * Songs from the Clay,' one hears sudden, 
swift laughter, lusty vagabonds singing by the hedgerows, the stirring 
of invisible angelic wings, and the sardonic chuckles of malevolent imps. 
Among the poets who have shared in the Celtic renaissance, Stephens 
is the crystal-gazer. He bends patiently over the great crystal of life 
and records the significance of the shadow shapes that gather and dis- 
solve within its confusing twilight, chanting to us truly, that no man 
shall ever be able to say, — whence, nor whither, — and, that nought 
endures at the end save the crystal itself. You can afford to miss much 
poetry, but you cannot afford to miss James Stephens' three collections, 
'Insurrections,' 'The Hill of Vision,' and 'Songs from the Clay.'" 

— Review of Reviews 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York 



BY THE SAME AUTHOR 

"There is not another book like this 'Crock of Gold' in English 
literature. There are many books like pieces of it, but the humor 
and the style — these things are Mr. Stephens's own peculiar gift." 

— The London Standard. 

The Crock of Gold 

Decorated cloth, i2tno, $1.25 

PRESS OPINIONS 

" It is crammed full of life and beauty . . . this delicious, fantastical, 
amorphous, inspired medley of topsy-turvy dom." — The Times. 

- " In ' The Crock of Gold ' Mr. Stephens gives the measure of a larger 
and more individual talent than could have been absolutely foretold. . . . 
There has been nothing hitherto quite like it, but it is safe to prophesy 
that by and by there will be plenty of imitators to take it for their pattern. 
. . . Mr. Stephens has produced a remarkably fine and attractive work 
of art." — The Athetuzum. 

" We have read nothing quite like ' The Crock of Gold.' It has a 
charm and humor peculiar to itself, and places its author high in the ranks 
of imaginative poetic writers." — The Globe. 

" The final state (in the case of the reviewer) was one of complete sur- 
render to the author — 'go on, go on, fiddle on your theme what har- 
monics you will; this is delightful.' . . . Mr. Stephens's novel, 'The 
Charwoman's Daughter,' was a remarkable book, and, in this one, he 
shows he can succeed as well in quite other directions." — The Nation. 

"... A genuine Irish Genius, one in whose heart there boil and 
bubble fantasy and tears, the irony that burns and a bitter-sweet humor 
that is mad." — James Huneker. 

"He shows a mastery of humorous and imaginative prose." — The 
Post. 

"... A fantasy, but a striking exception to the rule that fantasies are 
usually dull. It does not matter what it means, or whether it means any- 
thing. It is like sunlight, ozone, and high spirits. You splash in it as in 
a summer sea. There is no book in the world in the least like it, and 
probably there will never be another, which is the best reason for making 
the acquaintance of this one before it is out of print." — Atlantic Monthly. 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York 



BY THE SAME AUTHOR 

The Demi-Gods 

Clotfit i2tno, $i.jo 

"To write 'The Demi-Gods,' Mr. Stephens has dipped again into 
the sparkling fountain of his apparently inexhaustible originality. As 
was said of ' The Crock of Gold,' it does not matter what it means or 
whether it means anything. It goes to our heads as we surrender our- 
selves to it in a dazed fascination." — New York Times. 

"It would be hard to match anywhere in recent literature the fun 
and imaginative quality of the narrative of the theft by an archangel 
(' Finding is keepings,' said the archangel) of Brian O'Brien's thrip- 
pence, whereby heaven and hell were convulsed and Ireland dis- 
turbed." — Outlook. 

" It is a delightful book. The fun, the absurdity, the pathos, and 
above all the poetry ring true." — Sun Weekly. 

" It's like a spring rainbow, this story, so full is it of wit and wis- 
dom and tears and chuckles and tender, half-sorrowful smiles." — Chi- 
cago Herald. 

" Only James Stephens, the Irishman, could have written this tale." 
— Pittsburgh Post. 

" Every one who was enthusiastic over ' The Crock of Gold ' ought 
to be doubly enthusiastic over ' The Demi-Gods.' ... It is the work 
of a writer of vision, of frolic and original humour, and of splendid elo- 
quence." — London Daily News. 

" Scenes of freshness and beauty, charm and humour, and a light- 
stepping grace belong to Mr. Stephens's new book, as to all others 
which he has made. . . . Over the book's manner of writing and its 
happenings there is a shining quality of pure magic." — London Ob- 
server. 

" It is a book of obstinate liveliness and charm." — London Atht' 
naum. 

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York 



BY THE SAME AUTHOR 

Here Are Ladies 

Cloth, i2mo, $1.25 

" ' Here Are Ladies ' is the maddest, sanest, merriest, saddest collection 
of little stories and essays that has come to the reviewer's table in a six 
month." — Philadelphia Press. 

" Perhaps the real charm and strength of the book lie in the fact that 
it is a man's book; a book free of the drawing-room conventions, decent 
or indecent, which now obsess our fiction ; a book with the free and hearty 
voice of one honest man speaking to another in his shop or at his club." 

— The Nation. 

" In the present volume there are fun, fancy, philosophy, and some- 
times the tragic note, combined with a de Maupassant quality of tense, 
dramatic characterization which condenses a whole life-story into a few 
pages and makes the characters live human beings." — The Outlook. 

" It is a welcome relief to run across a new author of real talent, in the 
midst of a whole group of disappointing volumes ; and a case in point is 
James Stephens, author of Here Are Ladies.' " — The Bookman. 

" Not only are there ladies here, but men and incidents, love and ha- 
tred — all sorts of side-lights and glimpses at life from a whimsical, humor- 
ous point of view that does not lack human feeling." — New York Times. 

" One can't give the flavor of the book by quoting a few disconnected 
passages. As in " The Crock of Gold," here again we have humor of a 
fresh and delightful quality, whimsy and philosophy, poetry and romance, 
all squared up with life, and every page reflecting one of the most original 
and interesting personalities that has recently appeared in literature." 

- N. Y. Globe. 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York 



BY THE SAME AUTHOR 

InSUrreCtionS Boards, i2mo, %40 

"A volume which cannot fail to appeal because of its graceful ex- 
pression, sincerity of purpose and fine feeling for natural beauty." — 
Providence Journal. 

The Hill of Vision am,i*mo, $u> 5 

" ' The Hill of Vision ' is an unusual book. Stephens's point of 
view is thoughtful and thought compelling." — Brooklyn Eagle. 

" ' Insurrections ' — a booklet of brilliant verse. ... ' The Hill of 
Vision ' — a fine result of the new Celtic movement." — San Francisco 
Chronicle. 

"A book has come to our desk called 'The Hill of Vision' — a 
book that has about it an air of inspiration and a naive directness and 
intimacy that place it, in spirit, near to the work of William Blake." — 
Literary Digest. 

" No reader of poetry can afford to let • The Hill of Vision ' pass. 
It is one of the noteworthy volumes in the history of the Irish Literary 
Revival." — Boston Herald. 

" What is most distinctive in Mr. Stephens's poetry is its unflinch- 
ing view of life, its sheer penetration into the futility of solution or the 
comfort of compromise ... a new paganism, rigorous and unafraid." 
— Chicago Tribune. 

"... An unusual sense of all the values of rhythm and a striking 
power in the manipulation of words in picture-making." — The In- 
dependent. 

" Daring in occasional subjects and in untrammeled mode of ex- 
pression." — Buffalo Express. 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York 



